05.04.2014 Views

Issue 15 - Pdf Ctrl+P - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

Issue 15 - Pdf Ctrl+P - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

Issue 15 - Pdf Ctrl+P - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

Ctrl+<strong>Pdf</strong><br />

Journal <strong>of</strong> Contemporary Art<br />

A <strong>journal</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> published digitally for easy reproduction<br />

and circulation by anyone and everyone around the world<br />

www.ctrlp-<strong>art</strong><strong>journal</strong>.org<br />

Sade for Sade’s Sake (2008-9) by Paul Chan at the Arsenale 53rd Venice Biennale. Photo credits: Eliza Tan<br />

Uploaded <strong>Issue</strong> No. <strong>15</strong><br />

October 2009<br />

Essays 94 to 106<br />

ISSN 1908-9805<br />

Editorials<br />

Dealing with the Art Market/P1<br />

Flaudette May V. Datuin<br />

Art and the Market: Pining for a Breather?/P3<br />

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez<br />

The Philippine Modern:<br />

Conceiving a Collective Category/P33<br />

Parick D. Flores<br />

Prized Possessions:<br />

The Promise <strong>of</strong> the Contemporary<br />

in Philippine Art Competitions/P46<br />

Jay Giovanni Bautista<br />

Review<br />

The Brave New Works <strong>of</strong> 13A/P49<br />

Renée Alphonso<br />

About <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>’s Contributors<br />

and Editorial Board/P51<br />

<strong>Issue</strong> Editors<br />

Flaudette May V. Datuin<br />

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez<br />

Editorial Board<br />

Flaudette May V. Datuin<br />

Varsha Nair<br />

Judy Freya Sibayan<br />

What Does “Recovery” Look Like in the Art World?<br />

Or Surviving the Next Art Market Bubble/P6<br />

Irene S. Leung<br />

Re-framing the Biennale: 2010/P11<br />

Gina Fairley<br />

The 53rd Venice Biennale<br />

Fare Mondi, Making Worlds/P<strong>15</strong><br />

Eliza Tan<br />

Object Lessons/P20<br />

Patrick D. Flores<br />

Signs <strong>of</strong> Wonder/P22<br />

Joselina Cruz<br />

Lisa Yuskavage/P23<br />

Gerry Coulter<br />

Flashing Emin: Critical Analysis <strong>of</strong><br />

“Spectacular” Contemporary Arts/P28<br />

Kubilay Akman<br />

The Artist’s Reserved Rights<br />

Transfer and Sale Agreement/P32<br />

Seth Siegelaub<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


FlauDette may v. datuin<br />

Editorials<br />

Dealing with the Art Market<br />

In 29 April 1989 one <strong>of</strong> the eight white porcelain urinals based on Duchamp’s 1917 ‘readymade’<br />

and issued in 1964 by the Galleria Schwarz in Milan was bought for US$68,750<br />

at Sotheby, New York against an estimate <strong>of</strong> $2,000-2,500. According to Eileen Channin<br />

in her book Collecting Art (Craftsman House, 1990), it was one <strong>of</strong> the high points <strong>of</strong><br />

the Andy Warhol sale. Ironically for Duchamp, his urinal—through which he aimed to<br />

demonstrate that <strong>art</strong> objects had no intrinsic <strong>art</strong>istic value in terms <strong>of</strong> labor and material<br />

costs—became the <strong>art</strong> object he never intended it to be.<br />

“The buyer’s need for the object and exchange <strong>of</strong> this sum for it determined the<br />

value <strong>of</strong> that need and the value <strong>of</strong> the urinal, the <strong>art</strong> object,” writes Channin. “The value<br />

in the market then is the value <strong>of</strong> the need any single person has for an object. Price is<br />

dictated by supply and demand.” This observation is concretized in local terms by an<br />

anecdote that Tina Fernandez, one <strong>of</strong> the speakers in the <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> forum on the <strong>art</strong> market<br />

held at the Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines a few months back, relates:<br />

A collector walks into the gallery and asks: “do you have a Borlongan,<br />

Santos or Justiniani?” I asked: “are you familiar with their works?”<br />

And they said “no but a lot <strong>of</strong> my friends told us to buy and we are just<br />

st<strong>art</strong>ing to collect.” Why don’t you do this, I suggest, why don’t you<br />

browse through the gallery and tell me what works attract you or which<br />

works you find beautiful. At that time, there was an exhibition, but the<br />

labels were deliberately omitted. After following the suggestion, they<br />

totally ignored the Borlongan, Santos and Justiniani, and chose instead<br />

two paintings from an <strong>art</strong>ist they never heard <strong>of</strong> before.<br />

“A lot <strong>of</strong> collectors don’t know why they buy, what the <strong>art</strong>work is all about, they<br />

do not know what is beautiful to them,” Fernandez elaborates. Or as Channin observes,<br />

critical valuation has little to do with <strong>art</strong> market values or the price a buyer is prepared to<br />

pay according to how badly he/she needs and desires to acquire an object, egged on, as<br />

the Fernandez anecdote shows, by scant information from friends and peers. And since <strong>art</strong><br />

market valuations behave in “a less theoretical manner,” as Channin puts it, it is a pervasive<br />

perception that the <strong>art</strong> market <strong>of</strong> dealers, auction houses and collectors has “hijacked”<br />

the <strong>art</strong>s’ reward and value system. As curators, critics and scholars (including this writer)<br />

opined during the <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> forum, the <strong>art</strong> market revs up, overheats, sputters if not come<br />

to a complete stop, then revs up again exuberantly and at times, irrationally—without the<br />

proper curatorial and critical framework on how to view <strong>art</strong> beyond its commercial value.<br />

There is need to “create” informed collectors through education, Fernandez insists, and<br />

this is why she established Art Informel, a semi-commercial-cum-workshop-cum gallery<br />

space she formed out <strong>of</strong> a family residence with a group <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists.<br />

For Irene Leung, what has been missing is a “robust debate about monetization<br />

—where does <strong>art</strong> practice intersect with money?”—a question that, as Kubilay Akman<br />

suggests in his critique <strong>of</strong> the media-and-market savvy Tracey Emin, must take “account<br />

<strong>of</strong> the social, cultural and <strong>art</strong>istic structures that produce, reproduce and make it as <strong>art</strong> in<br />

a dynamic process.” Gerry Coulter does a similar maneuver by recuperating the controversial<br />

nudes <strong>of</strong> American painter Lisa Yuskavage. Lashing out at macho critics, Coulter<br />

reminds us <strong>of</strong> an important theoretical point contributed by feminism: seeing, looking<br />

and reacting to works, especially those that are couched in a visual idiom traditionally<br />

associated with male expression and creativity, is value-laden, and in this case, highly<br />

gendered.<br />

The tension between theoretically clueless criticism and un-theoretical commercial<br />

viability, on one hand and theoretically-informed critical valuation and legitimation, on<br />

the other, understandably creates anxieties to <strong>art</strong> historians, critics, <strong>art</strong>ists and curators<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


who believe their pr<strong>of</strong>essional endeavors should transcend market concerns, appealing<br />

instead, to aesthetic, philosophic, or even ethical and moral concerns. No less than Eileen<br />

Legaspi-Ramirez, guest- and co-editor for this issue expressed such anxiety, by prefacing<br />

her editorial with a disclosure about her soiled image <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> market and a recounting<br />

<strong>of</strong> her painful encounter, in 1994, with “vultures” who were circling her grandfather’s,<br />

National Artist Cesar Legaspi’s, deathbed knowing that their investment will multiply<br />

at his passing.<br />

Marina Cruz, a young rising star whose success in <strong>art</strong> fairs and auctions Legaspi-<br />

Ramirez describes as “dramatic” expressed at one point during her talk in the forum:<br />

“Are we less ‘good’ because we are commercially successful?” All she desires (perhaps<br />

naively, as another panelist points), she says, is for her work to be appreciated by the different<br />

publics—from the most knowledgeable <strong>of</strong> insiders to the least initiated <strong>art</strong> world<br />

‘outsiders,’ the people who, driven by curiosity, take the time to stop and look at the works<br />

she was documenting outside her house. The fact that collectors buy her works is a stroke<br />

<strong>of</strong> luck she is humbly grateful for, but like other <strong>art</strong>ists present in the forum, she values<br />

critical validation and recognition equally, if not more, than her commercial success.<br />

Joselina Cruz in her talk, on the other hand, took the <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> forum brief to task<br />

for what she perceived as unproblematized observation that boundaries are blurring between<br />

biennales/triennales, on one hand and <strong>art</strong> fairs, on the other. The first Philippine<br />

curator to join an international curatorial team in the biennale mode, Cruz insisted that<br />

while both have validation powers, the latter are more open-ended, more price-driven.<br />

Biennales, on the other hand, are more rigorously framed by a theoretical and critical<br />

mentality, even if such criticality is <strong>of</strong>ten compromised and limited—as she relates in<br />

her essay on her experiences curating the most recent Singapore Biennale—by logistic<br />

and contextual givens. Caught between what Gina Fairley describes as “a schizophrenic<br />

ricochet between the institutional white cube and the raw (un)familiar site, which has<br />

increasingly become a marketing chip to identifying and growing these events to local<br />

and international audiences” and layered “with a trend to package these exhibitions with<br />

other events,” the biennale’s critical and self-reflexive edge, st<strong>art</strong> to blur—exactly the<br />

point <strong>of</strong> the <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> forum brief and call for papers.<br />

For Eliza Tan, the Venice Biennale similarly <strong>of</strong>fers nothing perspectivally fresh,<br />

although she took diligent note <strong>of</strong> the good pace, narrative roundness and accessibility,<br />

and the hushed, un-ostentatious character <strong>of</strong> works in the curated segments. And in a<br />

more optimistic vein, Patrick Flores hailed the Gwanju Biennale as having a more robust<br />

theoretical frame and discussion, which was absent, he writes, in other eight biennales<br />

that opened in the same season <strong>of</strong> the year in Asia. Contributing to a section <strong>of</strong> Gwanju<br />

Biennale called Position Papers, he centered on four germinal figures on Southeast Asia,<br />

one <strong>of</strong> whom, Raymundo Albano, pioneered the Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines (CCP)<br />

collection. The contributions <strong>of</strong> Albano along with other lively minds <strong>of</strong> the early 70s to<br />

the 80s, most <strong>of</strong> whom are still active today (Sibayan, Pastor Roces, Chabet, to name a<br />

few) are reckoned with in Flores’ other essay in this issue—a reprint from the catalogue<br />

on the survey exhibition on the CCP collection, “Suddenly Turning Visible.”<br />

Jay Bautista’s essay on Philippine competitions rounds out—though in a less scholarly<br />

and critical vein—the material on the Philippine <strong>art</strong> world. It contains historical<br />

information that may prove useful to the uninitiated as well as anyone who is unfamiliar<br />

with Philippine <strong>art</strong> history. Along with the brief review <strong>of</strong> the Thirteen Artists Awards by<br />

Rina Alphonso, which the CCP bestows on young <strong>art</strong>ists nominated and deemed promising<br />

by a panel <strong>of</strong> jurors, Bautista’s essay tells us that, critical as we may be <strong>of</strong> competitions<br />

and awards, they remain influential shapers <strong>of</strong> careers, <strong>art</strong>istic directions and values,<br />

even as they are beset, as Legaspi-Ramirez recounts in her experience as juror, with the<br />

infrastructural and logistic constraints that similarly limit resource-rich blue-chip events<br />

like the biennales and triennales.<br />

As I write this, the CCP is holding a necrological service for the National Artist<br />

Awards, believed to have “died” because tainted by the unprincipled intervention <strong>of</strong> the<br />

state led by an unethical leader and her cohorts. Questions <strong>of</strong> creative autonomy, respect<br />

for peer-initiated process, and delicadeza vis-à-vis presidential prerogative empowered<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


y law are among the list <strong>of</strong> tangled issues that are played out in the expressions <strong>of</strong><br />

righteous indignation from Philippine <strong>art</strong> world luminaries, including former recipients<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Awards originated by the much-maligned one-time patroness <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong>s, Imelda<br />

Marcos. Just as we—cultural workers, writers, scholars, <strong>art</strong>ists—are concerned with the<br />

high-jacking <strong>of</strong> valuation and rewards by the <strong>art</strong> market, we are equally indignant at the<br />

high-jacking <strong>of</strong> our creative entitlements and prerogatives by an unprincipled state. This<br />

just goes to show that, no matter how we may try to confine our scholarly and creative<br />

work to intangibles—aesthetics, <strong>art</strong> history, criticism, theory, <strong>art</strong> production, <strong>art</strong>istic competence<br />

and vision—we cannot avoid “contamination” by forces from finance, politics<br />

and economics. At the same time, these intangible pursuits cannot be merely reduced to<br />

commercial terms, for they have a function as mechanisms quite independent, and even<br />

critical <strong>of</strong> any commercial and political efficacy.<br />

Art history and its allied disciplines thus function contradictorily by simultaneously<br />

establishing commercial worth and asserting autonomy and freedom from market forces,<br />

as the <strong>art</strong> historian Katherine Mansfield (Art History and Its Institutions, Routledge, 2002)<br />

observes. On one hand, <strong>art</strong> history supports the commercial status <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> by certifying<br />

attribution, age, style, medium <strong>of</strong> work and displaying, authenticating and establishing<br />

expert opinion on <strong>art</strong> works; on the other hand, <strong>art</strong> history has developed and systematized<br />

methods and categories related to “form,” “style,” “originality,” “freshness,” and<br />

“innovation,” thus facilitating aesthetic appreciation that defy commercial quantification.<br />

The very demand for originality and novelty for instance, creates an aura <strong>of</strong> divinity and<br />

glamour around a small group <strong>of</strong> favored <strong>art</strong>ists, which gets intensified when repackaged<br />

and disseminated through media sound bytes, public relations spins, catalogues, auctions,<br />

<strong>art</strong> fairs, biennales, thus further increasing the collectors’ desire and need to possess them,<br />

even despite or maybe because <strong>of</strong> efforts to sabotage the mechanisms <strong>of</strong> the market, as<br />

the Duchamp example shows.<br />

One key to “dealing with” the <strong>art</strong> market and making sense <strong>of</strong> this tangled web <strong>of</strong><br />

contradictions foregrounded by this modest collection <strong>of</strong> essays, is supplying or making<br />

available good, substantive and substantial information on works and <strong>art</strong>ists—the kind <strong>of</strong><br />

information that can accessed through Art Informel’s initiatives aimed at creating a group<br />

<strong>of</strong> more engaged collectors, and the kind <strong>of</strong> knowledge that can be gleaned in Flores’<br />

attempt to write an initial survey <strong>of</strong> local state-initiated <strong>art</strong> collecting framed by a vernacular<br />

modernism, in Coulter’s and Akman’s assertion <strong>of</strong> theoretical points on reception<br />

and <strong>art</strong> production via critiques <strong>of</strong> critics (Coulter on Yuskavage), and a current market<br />

darling (Akman on Emin), and even in Seth Seigelaub’s rather tongue-in-cheek mobilization<br />

<strong>of</strong> the language and framework <strong>of</strong> international law in his draft <strong>of</strong> an agreement<br />

form outlining the rights and responsibilities <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists and dealers. And bearing in mind<br />

that <strong>art</strong> making, <strong>art</strong> history, theory, curation, and <strong>art</strong> production are inescapably linked<br />

to objects with market value, what we should aim for is a principled negotiated practice,<br />

one that can only be sustained and achieved, to borrow from Cruz and Leung, with an<br />

undiminished sense <strong>of</strong> wonder, a capacity to imagine better futures, and a self-reflexivity<br />

eileen legaspi-ramirez<br />

Art and the Market: Pining for a Breather?<br />

I must confess that it was with much trepidation that I agreed to co-edit this issue on <strong>art</strong><br />

and the market. In the interest <strong>of</strong> full disclosure, let me just say that I didn’t always have<br />

such a soiled image <strong>of</strong> those who made up the financial backbone <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong>world. Having<br />

grown up in a household that had a hand in furthering a would-be National Artist’s early<br />

struggling years (when going full-time was not at all an imaginable option) provided a<br />

generous dose <strong>of</strong> pragmatism about how <strong>art</strong> and commerce inevitably encounter each<br />

other. But even then, it was already <strong>of</strong>f-putting to see how my grandmother and mother<br />

(the defacto <strong>art</strong> dealers in the clan) found themselves having to maneuver around those<br />

who postured as <strong>art</strong> lovers only to shamelessly bargain down the seasonal living <strong>of</strong><br />

those who craft the <strong>art</strong> that would ultimately find a space in some stately home, <strong>of</strong>fice,<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


or gallery. It did not help that when my grandfather was dying <strong>of</strong> prostrate cancer in<br />

1994, I’d tenuously explored the possibility <strong>of</strong> following in my mother’s footsteps, only<br />

to find out that the vultures (who were unabashedly banking on how their ‘investment’<br />

in Cesar Legaspi would double in value upon the public announcement <strong>of</strong> his passing)<br />

were circling around the family holdings so menacingly there was hardly room to move.<br />

So, pardon me please if I’m not so readily able to share the optimism <strong>of</strong> New York Times<br />

critic Holland Cotter, here cited by Irene Leung about the <strong>art</strong>world getting back to the<br />

making rather than the hyping <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> (aka the bogus claim to being able to reduce the<br />

validation <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> to auction figures, collector pr<strong>of</strong>ile, museum outings, and such).<br />

The <strong>art</strong>world does in fact operate amidst the contestation and collusion <strong>of</strong> agents<br />

within it. And by agents, I do invoke here the entire spectrum—from those who make<br />

work to those who encounter it in some degree <strong>of</strong> public engagement or other—even<br />

within a private space where the <strong>art</strong> is no longer up for grabs but merely there for contemplation<br />

or as intended object <strong>of</strong> covetousness masquerading as public educational tool.<br />

Art really makes for the strangest bedfellows—note how edge and safe haven occupied<br />

the same physical space in the Singapore Art Biennale (SAB) as mentioned in Gina<br />

Fairley’s account Re-framing the Biennale 2010. SAB’s physically situating its parallel<br />

<strong>art</strong> fair literally in the bowels <strong>of</strong> one <strong>of</strong> its main sites is, to some degree, replicated in the<br />

recent Philippine <strong>art</strong> fair which literally positioned non-selling agents <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong>world at<br />

the fringes <strong>of</strong> the Bonifacio Global City’s The Tent.<br />

One is tempted to ask, is this what it has come down to then? The once heady<br />

power-wielding and presumably less market-implicated institutions like museums and<br />

cultural centers merely orbiting around the moneyed as mere satellites in the cosmos?<br />

Specifically in the case <strong>of</strong> the Philippine <strong>art</strong>world where the intersections between<br />

collectors-dealers-curators constantly get crossed, with catalogues primarily getting selfpublished,<br />

exhibitions self-curated and promoted, and too many <strong>art</strong>ists producing work<br />

primarily for auctions, the indications are troubling at the very least. In a world where<br />

everyone gets to have a say, which voices will ultimately drown out the rest? How do<br />

such savvy ways to circumvent the webbed systems <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> valuation bode for the making<br />

and meaning-making around <strong>art</strong>? In one sense <strong>of</strong> course, the dispersal <strong>of</strong> power is<br />

welcome given the decentralization but then that also too easily tips over to populist<br />

excess. How will this juggling <strong>of</strong> roles and fence-demolition play out in an environment<br />

where the field remains dramatically uneven between those who look at <strong>art</strong> as the<br />

last bastion <strong>of</strong> imagination and unfettered thought vis-a-vis those who perceive it as just<br />

another economic cog to be left to the workings <strong>of</strong> an already discredited invisible hand<br />

that reduces it to pesos and centavos?<br />

Kubilay Akman, in Flashing Emin,Critical Analysis <strong>of</strong> “Spectacular” Contemporary<br />

Arts, posits that the <strong>art</strong>ists implicated in exercises in specularization subject themselves<br />

to “harming the innocence” <strong>of</strong> the production process, wherein they lose the possibility<br />

<strong>of</strong> making <strong>art</strong> that is more than passing fancy in this highly mediatized world. His text<br />

begs the question: is the gallery floor always a scene <strong>of</strong> a crime then given this daily<br />

ritual <strong>of</strong> instrumentalization? Does <strong>art</strong> in fact die when it becomes consumable monetarily<br />

or becomes <strong>of</strong> use to those in power? Ergo, can such <strong>art</strong> be rescued from this<br />

plight by being physically effaced or literally destroyed? To my mind, such questions<br />

are p<strong>art</strong>icularly pertinent to us in the Philippines, in that locally, even the ‘bad boys’ are<br />

constantly under threat <strong>of</strong> being defanged by rabid hoarders only too eager to render the<br />

discordant mute.<br />

The next question perhaps would be, if all ‘critical’ <strong>art</strong> is removed from the center,<br />

doesn’t the gap get merely filled with the palatable and toothless? Enough recent undertakings<br />

both in institutional and alternative spaces hereabouts demonstrate this bind—occupy<br />

or abandon? Undermine or forfeit? To this now admittedly cynical mind, the luxury <strong>of</strong><br />

keeping to an either-or posture is precisely untenable because the stakes are too high.<br />

In the end, perhaps <strong>art</strong>’s saving grace rests in its being a largely speculative endeavor.<br />

Precisely because the compass is constantly being reinvented and tweaked, the<br />

mechanisms are just almost always difficult to get a handle on. Thrust into the difficult<br />

position <strong>of</strong> evaluating some 50 portfolios for the recent Thirteen Artists Award, we three<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


judges found ourselves ultimately constrained by such non-<strong>art</strong> considerations as the<br />

sluggishness <strong>of</strong> the institutional structure, the unwillingness <strong>of</strong> members <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong>world<br />

to <strong>art</strong>iculate or merely sit back and grunt at the results <strong>of</strong> such exercises, even the banal<br />

consideration <strong>of</strong> how portfolios were put together to begin with. The fact really is, there<br />

are no hard and fast rules and this is in no small due to the fact that the more presumably<br />

invested qu<strong>art</strong>ers in the <strong>art</strong>world are either too lazy, too hermetic, or too defeated to<br />

wager—how many <strong>art</strong>ists, collectors, gallerists, even curators actually take the time <strong>of</strong>f<br />

from their nuanced interests to keep up with what’s being written and said about <strong>art</strong>, or<br />

visit each other’s studios/spaces, or ask tough questions about their own practices?<br />

It shouldn’t be too surprising then that the idea prevailing in the public imagination<br />

is an <strong>art</strong>world still merely constituted by qu<strong>art</strong>ers that vote with their billfolds. And<br />

yet, Gerry Coulter reminds us in this issue <strong>of</strong> <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> (with his text on the nudes <strong>of</strong> Lisa<br />

Yuskavage) that we do in fact, weigh in with such non-monetary acts as reading, how<br />

the “failure <strong>of</strong> beauty” cues us into the gaps and fissures that make for <strong>art</strong> that does not<br />

run away from the possibility <strong>of</strong> difficulty.<br />

Questions <strong>of</strong> Impetus<br />

Let us say outright that there will always be poseurs and hucksters on all fronts—<strong>art</strong>ists<br />

who pad CVs, collectors who negotiate down prices on the premise <strong>of</strong> keeping works<br />

for themselves, dealers and PR hacks who play up credentials that ultimately do not count<br />

in the long term. But precisely because there is still enough currency behind the idea that<br />

<strong>art</strong> is the ultimate realm <strong>of</strong> creation, a domain from which emancipatory ideas emerge<br />

unhindered to some degree or other by norm and acceptability, the still implicit notion<br />

is that <strong>art</strong> needs to be held to a higher standard irreducible to merely self-gratification,<br />

eking out a livelihood, and accessorizing condominiums.<br />

Note the treacherous terrain for instance that gets treaded upon with the fairly recent<br />

attempt (in the Philippines anyway) to invoke the paradigm <strong>of</strong> cultural industry to peg<br />

the production <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> to quantifiable percentages <strong>of</strong> GDP. Unfortunately, in an environment<br />

where hammer prices and spin are taken as gospel truth, the only cold fact is that<br />

the only real dupes are those that refuse to do their homework and merrily ride the wave<br />

borne on mostly flawed information and self-aggrandizing though pr<strong>of</strong>essionally crafted<br />

must-see events which still a bevy <strong>of</strong> exhibitions and literature ultimate are.<br />

Further, when <strong>art</strong>ists refuse to speak, they effectively hand over the reins to those<br />

who may or may not have any investment in honoring the creative impulse much less<br />

keep to some palpable barometer <strong>of</strong> integrity. Thus we find ourselves in the anomalous<br />

situation where collectors, donor institutions are allowed to invoke market value to keep<br />

from paying taxes but <strong>art</strong>ists are reduced to pinning value based on materials used; inevitably,<br />

we will continue to ask—how does one know what <strong>art</strong> is worth? Hopefully we get<br />

to the realization sooner than later about how truly slippery such an endeavor is—what is<br />

one to latch unto really <strong>of</strong> relevant google links? Twitter citations? ‘Bejewelled’ bodies<br />

at glitzy openings and <strong>art</strong> fairs? Number <strong>of</strong> warm-bodied globe-trotting curators singing<br />

paeans and gone <strong>art</strong>ist-wooing?<br />

“Is audience a dirty word?”, critic Gina Fairley gets asked in a recent public forum<br />

in Sydney. And in invoking a resounding ‘no’ she hints at the possible gains <strong>of</strong> risking<br />

failure and rejection that we in turn find in Patrick Flores’s piece Object Lessons from<br />

his experience as one <strong>of</strong> the curators <strong>of</strong> the recent Gwangju Biennale, or even in Joselina<br />

Cruz’s “dismal” rate <strong>of</strong> success in resisting the baggage that came with becoming one <strong>of</strong><br />

three curators <strong>of</strong> the 2008 SAB. This vacuum-visibilitty dilemma is not at all a monopoly<br />

<strong>of</strong> the visual <strong>art</strong>s as seen in the continuing tangling for the ‘indie label’ among those<br />

genuinely interested in crafting an alternative film language and those merely looking for<br />

a quick buck. And yet we have not even begun to talk about how ‘going international’<br />

has become a definite route toward earning a local audience upon a film’s homecoming<br />

post-festival roadtrip. By going straight to auction, are the visual <strong>art</strong>ists merely following<br />

suit? On what terms do we attempt to engage?<br />

Perhaps undeniably so, this question about making sense <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> in such uncloyingly<br />

reductionist terms is never going to be going the way <strong>of</strong> rocket science. And this is even<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


amidst such utopic conditions as full disclosure (who is collecting what and why should<br />

they be inhibiting themselves from specific venues for valuation—exhibit programming,<br />

judging, etc.) and a seamless information system that allows contending ideas to get to<br />

the people who need to hear and digest them most. Leung speaks <strong>of</strong> how <strong>art</strong> is ‘rudderless’<br />

p<strong>art</strong>icularly in the ideal world where the ultimate arbiters would be the makers <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong><br />

themselves who might in fact choose to be intractable. But hope floats or all <strong>art</strong>making<br />

would cease. Thus the only tenable way to keep the <strong>art</strong>world honest would be if all agents<br />

would enter into the fray, boldly if not inerrantly speak rather than succumb to merely<br />

working out <strong>of</strong> each other’s comfy and self-interested nests. There are no pat answers<br />

but at least attempting to journey toward them is genuine gain.<br />

irene s. leung<br />

What Does “Recovery” Look Like<br />

in the Art World? Or Surviving<br />

the Next Art Market Bubble<br />

News about General Motors re-emerging out <strong>of</strong> bankruptcy in just one month sent all<br />

the media pundits scrambling for words. With 27,000 fewer employees and 13 fewer<br />

car plants, it somehow acquired a new sheen—“smaller, leaner, tougher.” I for one, feel<br />

that we are all our own individual GM companies—we have become leaner and tougher<br />

through the hard times. But is there a comparable example in the <strong>art</strong> world?<br />

With the overnight vanishing <strong>of</strong> wealth and the near-collapse <strong>of</strong> the credit markets,<br />

some, like Holland Cotter, <strong>art</strong> critic <strong>of</strong> the New York Times, breathed a sigh <strong>of</strong> relief that<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists are once again left alone to make <strong>art</strong> rather than being picked over by “cadres<br />

<strong>of</strong> public relations specialists” (i.e. the critics, curators, editors, publishers and career<br />

theorists) driven by dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and…event planners. 1<br />

Granted, the <strong>art</strong> world has not and will probably never embrace speculative investment.<br />

But surely some <strong>of</strong> us would miss the frequent <strong>art</strong> fairs and biennales. Yet who is to say<br />

when the stock market eventually rebounds to irrational exuberance, that the critics,<br />

collectors, financiers, and dealers won’t contrive to create the next <strong>art</strong> market bubble?<br />

Which <strong>art</strong> works would become the darling <strong>of</strong> the market? Which country would be<br />

the hotbed <strong>of</strong> new talents? Who will be the new investors willing to inflate the next <strong>art</strong><br />

market bubble?<br />

Given that everyone seems to be waiting for a sign to see where the wind blows, the<br />

key question is not so much about how to do away with market agents because speculators<br />

and investors are here to stay, but how <strong>art</strong> world depends on its rich patrons and has<br />

worked hard to influence what they think and how they invest. We are not speaking <strong>of</strong><br />

having a Cosimo de’ Medici, but the <strong>art</strong> world has depended on the collectors, donors,<br />

and corporations to keep it alive. What has been missing is a robust debate about monetization<br />

– where does <strong>art</strong> practice intersect with money? Art needs an account balance<br />

sheet because <strong>art</strong> is livelihood. Art is also a subsidy because the <strong>art</strong> market only supports<br />

a small percentage <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists very well while others do not receive much.<br />

The editors <strong>of</strong> this issue <strong>of</strong> <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> have rightly pointed out the interconnectedness<br />

<strong>of</strong> ‘<strong>art</strong> world’ and the ‘<strong>art</strong> market.’ One simply cannot exist without the other, yet the <strong>art</strong><br />

market and the <strong>art</strong> world play by very different rules and thrive on different stimulants. As<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists and <strong>art</strong>s pr<strong>of</strong>essionals, we seem to always be on the defensive, constantly justifying<br />

the role <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>s in society. Why must the <strong>art</strong>s be seen as expendable as corporate jets<br />

in times <strong>of</strong> financial crises? Why are the utilities <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>s constantly being questioned, as<br />

opposed to, say, Math and sciences? On the other hand, the mantra <strong>of</strong> “<strong>art</strong> for <strong>art</strong>s sake”<br />

actually undermines the extraordinarily diverse and complex reasons why we make <strong>art</strong><br />

and pay for the <strong>art</strong>s; it denies the social, religious and political functions that the <strong>art</strong>s<br />

serve in human history and continues to do so.<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Ostensibly, much <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> market hype could be blamed on the media. Damien Hirst<br />

makes headline news, but much else <strong>of</strong> the <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> world has been confined to<br />

the <strong>art</strong> world itself. Could we honestly say the <strong>art</strong> world has bothered to explain itself to<br />

the rest <strong>of</strong> the world? Instead, it has relied on the ‘public relations specialists’ to compete<br />

for the he<strong>art</strong>s and minds <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> collectors. Working <strong>art</strong>ists, and especially community <strong>art</strong>s<br />

groups, suffer the most from the likes <strong>of</strong> Charles Saatchi and his public relations machinery.<br />

Even as the argument that the <strong>art</strong>s create jobs and bolster the economy has been<br />

floating around for decades, it would soon become a cliché because many could say the<br />

same about the auto industry or Wall Street. 2 Would the government ever say that the<br />

<strong>art</strong> world needs a bail out because it is ‘too big to fail’? (Remember U.S. government<br />

owns 61% <strong>of</strong> General Motors now?) Would <strong>art</strong> world’s collapse cause ‘systemic risk’ to<br />

the rest <strong>of</strong> the world?<br />

Putting the Arts on Trial<br />

What I’d like to explore is whether we have we become too accustomed to the inevitability<br />

<strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>s’ existence that we justify it through faith alone? The tangled argument<br />

about the <strong>art</strong>s could be gleaned from a recent public debate held by Intelligence Squared<br />

US (IQ2US) that asked: “Is the <strong>art</strong> market less moral than the stock market?” (3 February<br />

2009) The side that argued against the motion—represented by <strong>art</strong>ist Chuck Close,<br />

<strong>art</strong> critic Jerry Saltz, and auctioneer Amy Capellazzo—lost the debate. In retrospect, the<br />

defenders kept trying to explain the value <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> but could not defend the operations<br />

<strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> market, which is the key issue <strong>of</strong> the debate. They believe in <strong>art</strong> so much that<br />

they were ill equipped to speak for the <strong>art</strong> market. Moreover, associating <strong>art</strong> with morality<br />

somehow ended up putting the <strong>art</strong> world—not the <strong>art</strong> market—on trial.<br />

It was an interesting twist <strong>of</strong> logic, for it was not because the organizers <strong>of</strong> the<br />

IQ2US debate were not aware that ‘markets’ do not operate by ‘morals.’ The debate’s<br />

chair and its main funder, Robert Rosenkranz, asserts in his opening statement that secrecy<br />

and manipulation makes the <strong>art</strong> market less ethical than the stock market. His argument<br />

goes like this: there are rules against insider trading in the stock market, but not in the<br />

<strong>art</strong> market, he said, “the <strong>art</strong> market is advertising prices at auction that are not real, that<br />

are intended really to deceive people about the true state <strong>of</strong> the market.”<br />

First <strong>of</strong> all, <strong>art</strong> does not behave in the same way as other commodities. Chuck Close<br />

said he hates to see dealers “talk about <strong>art</strong> as if they were selling hog futures. It’s another<br />

kind <strong>of</strong> business.” This is precisely the issue: <strong>art</strong> is a completely different kind <strong>of</strong> business—one<br />

that is infinitely more diverse and complex than any other businesses in the<br />

world. Thus, it seems disingenuous for Rosenkranz to throw in the red herring that there<br />

is a ‘real price’ in the <strong>art</strong> market.<br />

Rosenkranz could not possibly frame the debate question out <strong>of</strong> ignorance <strong>of</strong> the<br />

complexity <strong>of</strong> market functions—for he has made his fortune in private equity investment.<br />

Also, he is an avid collector <strong>of</strong> <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> and is married to Alexandra Munroe,<br />

Senior Curator <strong>of</strong> Asian Art at the Guggenheim. Rosenkranz would know that the <strong>art</strong><br />

market does not function as market in the classical sense —where prices heavily depend on<br />

the equilibrium <strong>of</strong> supply and demand as well as ‘perfect information’ on the market.<br />

In fact, it has been asserted by an economist that the <strong>art</strong> marketing process is<br />

“rudderless.” As a result, “the imperfection <strong>of</strong> the available information on prices and<br />

transactions does not matter in the sense that better information about the behavior <strong>of</strong> the<br />

market really would not help anyone to make decisions more effectively.” 3 Rosenkranz<br />

would know very well that pitching the terms “real prices” and “true state <strong>of</strong> the market”<br />

as normative statements was misleading at best. Moreover, the three people who won<br />

the debate (who were <strong>art</strong> dealers and collectors) explicitly stated that they do not want<br />

to see the <strong>art</strong> market regulated. Again, why complain about the ‘lack <strong>of</strong> morals’ if they<br />

actually don’t want the rules changed?<br />

One wonders if this IQUS2 debate was an insidious plot to discourage future investors<br />

in <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>. For these collectors and dealers know full well the benefits <strong>of</strong><br />

being free from state interference. Writer and documentary filmmaker Ben Lewis explains<br />

why <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> is “an ideal vehicle for speculative euphoria.”<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Governments have had little interest in regulating the trinkets and playthings<br />

<strong>of</strong> the super-rich. Art works are a uniquely portable and confidential form <strong>of</strong><br />

wealth. Whereas all property purchases have to be publicly registered, buying<br />

<strong>art</strong> is a private activity. And unlike old masters, which are <strong>of</strong>ten linked by<br />

history to specific places, <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> knows no frontiers. 4<br />

Take for example, in the midst <strong>of</strong> the financial market bubble, the <strong>art</strong> market inflation<br />

was ridiculously exaggerated: the Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang saw his work<br />

appreciate 6,000 times, from $1,000 to $6 million between 1999-2008; while the American<br />

<strong>art</strong>ist Richard Prince’s work went up 60 to 80 times between 2003-2008. 5<br />

In some ways, the <strong>art</strong> market behaves more like executive salaries than the stock<br />

market. In appearance, both the <strong>art</strong>s and executive salaries seem to be based on merit<br />

—but the ratio between merit and performance is actually very opaque.<br />

The number is actually “a signaling mechanism,” explains Seth Godin, a marketing<br />

expert, regarding the myth <strong>of</strong> big executive salaries. In order to solicit the best and the<br />

brightest, firms compete with each other by engineering a salary structure that attempts<br />

to bid higher than a competing firm. Moreover, these firms have a board <strong>of</strong> directors<br />

consisting <strong>of</strong> executives from other companies, so the salaries <strong>of</strong> this elite group keep<br />

paying each other higher and higher salaries that explode out <strong>of</strong> proportion compared to<br />

salaries <strong>of</strong> other employees in the same company.<br />

The similarities go further. As executive salaries have been disconnected from performance,<br />

so has the value <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> been disconnected with other known indicators<strong>of</strong> value.<br />

In a sobering and sometimes sarcastic essay written by Donald Kuspit, an <strong>art</strong> historian<br />

and philosopher, he points out how the irrational exuberance was less about the value <strong>of</strong><br />

<strong>art</strong> than it was about the value <strong>of</strong> money:<br />

The intrinsic value <strong>of</strong> these paintings has, whatever it is…never [made] them<br />

more valuable than the extrinsic value [at which they were acquired] by reason<br />

<strong>of</strong> their exchange value, that is, the money that becomes their equivalent.<br />

More crucially, recognized by money, they can no longer be recognized for<br />

what they <strong>art</strong>istically are. Nor can they be questioned and put in historical<br />

perspective... The price paid for a work <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> becomes its absolute and<br />

authoritative value, even if the value the price implies is not p<strong>art</strong>icularly<br />

clear. It is presented without explanation—the price is the explanation. 6<br />

Fueled by the illusive promise <strong>of</strong> exorbitant returns, the <strong>art</strong> market lost its justification<br />

for <strong>art</strong> and became a market <strong>of</strong> markets. What Ben Lewis calls “specullecting” by<br />

the likes <strong>of</strong> Charles Saatchi may be all too common as an integral p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> world<br />

now. In the late 1990s Saatchi bought the work <strong>of</strong> young <strong>art</strong>ists, established a museum<br />

in which to display it, lent it to public museums, and used his celebrity status to attract<br />

media attention. He then sold p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> his collection at auctions. The works then came to<br />

be associated with the celebrity collector, diminishing the value <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> itself.<br />

Anyone who thinks that all they need to do is to try to outsm<strong>art</strong> the <strong>art</strong> market may<br />

have random success at best. There have been countless studies by economists showing<br />

the low rate <strong>of</strong> return on <strong>art</strong> if one were to use it as investment. Analysis <strong>of</strong> historical<br />

data from 1650 to 1960 shows that the real annual rate <strong>of</strong> return was 0.5% on paintings<br />

as compared to 2.5% on government bonds. Another figure was slightly more optimistic,<br />

but similar—2% real returns on paintings compared to 3.3% real interest rate <strong>of</strong> the<br />

Bank <strong>of</strong> England. 7<br />

This figure is dismal for investors, but what about the figure for working <strong>art</strong>ists?<br />

In his misguided defense <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> world (rather than the <strong>art</strong> market) in the IQ2US debate,<br />

Jerry Saltz says “1% <strong>of</strong> 1% <strong>of</strong> 1% <strong>of</strong> 1% <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists actually make money. And even<br />

they barely do and usually only for a very short time.” This adds another dimension to<br />

our picture – do <strong>art</strong>ists actually benefit from the <strong>art</strong> market? If not, then how could they<br />

make a living in spite <strong>of</strong> the monstrous alliance between the <strong>art</strong> world and the financial<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


market? If we cannot do away with over zealous investors and “specullectors,” how<br />

should the <strong>art</strong> world brace for the next <strong>art</strong> market bubble? What are some <strong>of</strong> the ways<br />

to negotiate such an imperfect rewards system? In our ever-changing consumer culture<br />

where we have come to rely on rankings, ratings, pricing, and reckless search for ‘perfect<br />

information,’ how do enduring <strong>art</strong>istic values get through this plethora <strong>of</strong> chatter and<br />

public relation games?<br />

The Reward System for the Arts<br />

The <strong>art</strong> world is savvy enough not to stick its heads into the sand by avoiding the fact<br />

that <strong>art</strong> needs to be monetized somehow—we are not facing up to the fact that as <strong>art</strong>ists<br />

and <strong>art</strong>s pr<strong>of</strong>essions, we all have to translate the act <strong>of</strong> producing (and writing about) <strong>art</strong><br />

into livelihoods. All <strong>of</strong> us p<strong>art</strong>icipate in some form <strong>of</strong> ‘monetization’ because we expect<br />

to be compensated directly or indirectly from the <strong>art</strong>s. The <strong>art</strong>s are heterogeneous—some<br />

are self-sustaining while others rely on a support structure (i.e. public/private funding,<br />

paying audiences). If we count music recording, architecture, film, and design as p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong><br />

the <strong>art</strong> world, then these are fine examples <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong>s being able to sustain themselves<br />

through a business model. But performing <strong>art</strong>s and visual <strong>art</strong>s have different challenges<br />

in the era <strong>of</strong> shrinking public and private investment. The <strong>art</strong>s thrive with the injection<br />

<strong>of</strong> money, but the market goes through random cycles that do not always reward creativity<br />

and ideas. So how may we make sense <strong>of</strong> the reward system? What might be ways<br />

to expand it? How do we reconceptualize value creation to seek new connectivities and<br />

re-examine our expectations?<br />

First, let’s re-examine the issue <strong>of</strong> the costs <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>. William Baumol, one <strong>of</strong> the<br />

very first scholars who used economic analysis to the <strong>art</strong>s as an industry, co-authored a<br />

book entitled Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (1966). From the perspective <strong>of</strong><br />

classical economists, the <strong>art</strong>s, especially performing <strong>art</strong>s such as live music or theatre,<br />

belong to the “technologically unprogressive industries.” Using performing <strong>art</strong>s as a<br />

st<strong>art</strong>ing point, Baumol points to the gap between financing performances in the face <strong>of</strong><br />

inevitable rising unit costs because it is unable to adapt and evolve with technology to<br />

make it more efficient or cost effective. Not only that live performing <strong>art</strong>s do not pay<br />

for themselves, but that they would show deficits <strong>of</strong> increasing size over time. This is<br />

what is known as “Baumol’s cost disease”—a concept that seems to have been all but<br />

forgotten in the <strong>art</strong>s literature. Subsequent studies in the 1980s and 1990s show that the<br />

book’s prediction was not entirely correct because ticket prices rose much faster than the<br />

general price level without causing a drop in attendance. On the other hand, performing<br />

<strong>art</strong>s companies have been cutting costs by reducing the number <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists who perform<br />

to cut down on labor costs. Since ticket prices do not match the real cost <strong>of</strong> the performance,<br />

companies resort to subsidies either from the government or from private donors.<br />

By relying on subsidies, according to classical economic theory, this prevents market<br />

prices from reflecting their true costs. 8<br />

This actually brings us back to the beginning <strong>of</strong> the essay about needing better<br />

arguments for the <strong>art</strong>s. The <strong>art</strong>s are not unique as a ‘stagnant sector.’ Schools, hospitals,<br />

and service industries suffer the same fate—wages for these sectors would keep widening<br />

despite the rise in wages across the board for other sectors. The theory goes, “sooner<br />

or later, the price <strong>of</strong> concerts, <strong>art</strong> galleries, haircuts, restaurants meals, college courses,<br />

hospital beds, etc. must move steadily upward, so that by the year 2010 or 2020 or 2030<br />

consumers will be spending 30, 40, 50% <strong>of</strong> their budgets on schooling, medical care,<br />

and personal services in general.” 9<br />

This is a sobering reality because schools and hospitals are accepted as integral<br />

p<strong>art</strong>s <strong>of</strong> social welfare. The wage gap is widening for the <strong>art</strong>s, but it is stuck between a<br />

dysfunctional <strong>art</strong> market on the one hand, and not being able to fully convince anyone<br />

that it is a public good. In the United States, the advocacy group Americans for the Arts<br />

just won a temporary battle to override the Senate’s vote by putting $50 million back<br />

into President Obama’s stimulus bill targeted for the National Endowment for the Arts. 10<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


The war is not over, as they say. In the mean time, private and corporate donors step<br />

in to subsidize the true costs—but only during good economic times, and usually with<br />

fickle board members or narrow grant guidelines. Moreover, most donors do not provide<br />

long-term support, and usually do not work closely with <strong>art</strong>s groups to create sustainable<br />

programs or develop income streams. From the grantseekers’ point <strong>of</strong> view, much effort<br />

has to be put into cultivating donors despite limited staff time and resources.<br />

Could the <strong>art</strong> world ever bare its true costs? It has always struggled with the precarious<br />

nature <strong>of</strong> its own un-sustainability. Moreover, politicians exploit this fissure by<br />

calling attention to controversial <strong>art</strong> that has received public funding. The politicization<br />

further distracts us from a robust debate about the values <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> in society—the <strong>art</strong>s’<br />

heterogeneity makes it especially difficult to have a coherent voice and an improved set<br />

<strong>of</strong> rationales. On the other hand, the reward system for the <strong>art</strong>s is not likely to change<br />

without concerted efforts on the p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the advocates.<br />

Endnotes<br />

1. H. Cotter, “The Boom is Over, Long<br />

Live the Art!” New York Times,<br />

<strong>15</strong> February 2009.<br />

2. G. Sandow, “The Arts need a Better<br />

Argument,” The Wall Street Journal, 18<br />

February 2009.<br />

3. W. Baumol, “Unnatural Value: or Art<br />

Investment as Floating Crap Game,”<br />

AEA Papers and Proceedings 76.2 (May<br />

1986), 10-14.<br />

4. B. Lewis, “The Second Tulip Mania,”<br />

Prospect Magazine, Dec 2008.<br />

5. Cited by B. Lewis.<br />

6. D. Kuspit, “Art Values or Market<br />

Values,” <strong>art</strong>net, March 2007.<br />

7. B. Frey, “Art Markets and Economics:<br />

An Introduction,” Journal <strong>of</strong> Cultural<br />

Economics 21(1997): 165-173.<br />

8. J. Heilbrun, “Baumol’s Cost Disease,”<br />

in Ruth Towse, Handbook <strong>of</strong> Cultural<br />

Economics (2003).<br />

9. M. Blaug, “Final Comments on the<br />

Plenary Session on Baumol and Bowen,”<br />

Journal <strong>of</strong> Cultural Economics 20 (1996):<br />

249-250.<br />

10. G. Sandow (2009).<br />

Can the Art World Recover?<br />

I realize this essay states the problem in different ways rather than give answers. But<br />

even if there were a Yellow Brick Road, the Wizard <strong>of</strong> Oz is nothing more than a quack<br />

hiding behind smoke screens and tricks. Since the <strong>art</strong> market has mostly hijacked <strong>art</strong>s’<br />

reward system and subsidies are not easily obtained with fuzzy justifications, let us turn<br />

to the issue <strong>of</strong> value creation. On behalf <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>’s defense during IQ2US debate, Chuck<br />

Close asserts that, “Art is a meritocracy. It is a meritocracy because the final arbiters <strong>of</strong><br />

what is important are other <strong>art</strong>ists. All the hype, all the spin, all the effort to construct a<br />

career out <strong>of</strong> thin air, all the efforts to manipulate the market notwithstanding.”<br />

In many ways, the <strong>art</strong> world that Chuck Close describes is the ideal world when<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists have stable income and their pensions are secured and they would live without<br />

critics, curators, editors, publishers, dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and<br />

event planners. But consider for a moment if <strong>art</strong>ists could become better arbiters, what<br />

would this alternate <strong>art</strong> world look like? What sort <strong>of</strong> platform would allow <strong>art</strong>ists to<br />

function better as each other’s arbiters?<br />

In most industries, competition engenders innovation and spurs productivity. Lessons<br />

from recent history tell us that moments <strong>of</strong> creative fervor come in waves and despite<br />

the fact that they were brief and quickly co-opted by the mainstream—these moments<br />

usually happen when <strong>art</strong>ists work with each other rather than chase after the <strong>art</strong> market.<br />

In the 1970s in New York, Holland Cotter recalls: “…the energy was collective, but the<br />

mix was different…everybody did everything—painting, writing, performing, filming,<br />

photocopying zines, playing in bands—and new forms arrived, including hip-hop, graffiti,<br />

No Wave cinema, appropriation <strong>art</strong> and the first definable body <strong>of</strong> “out” queer <strong>art</strong>. So did<br />

unusual ways <strong>of</strong> exhibiting work: in cars, in bathrooms, in subways.”<br />

We are obviously not going to turn the clock backwards as if the same magic formula<br />

still works. For 2010 and beyond, it shall be a different story. Maybe it is time that we take<br />

a different look at what is making the world turn now. How could the <strong>art</strong>s communicate<br />

better with different sectors <strong>of</strong> the society? Are there lessons to be learned from the green<br />

revolution? Are there lessons to be learned from the infectious micr<strong>of</strong>inance movement<br />

made famous by Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunnus? What about open source s<strong>of</strong>tware?<br />

An exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum entitled “Design for the other 90%” showed<br />

how we <strong>of</strong>ten forget that 90% <strong>of</strong> the world’s population have little or no access to products<br />

and services many <strong>of</strong> us take for granted. Nearly half <strong>of</strong> this disadvantaged population<br />

does not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter. So why shouldn’t the <strong>art</strong>s<br />

help imagine and create different futures for everyone?<br />

10 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


gina fairley<br />

Reframing the Biennale:2010<br />

“If history st<strong>art</strong>s to become something that can be thrown open to debate<br />

only when it has been recreated and recast in narrative form by historians<br />

[and I would add curators], should we look at the validity <strong>of</strong> the language<br />

that gives it force…” - Levent Çalikoglu 1<br />

Weekend crowds at SH<strong>contemporary</strong>08<br />

Art Fair, Shanghai.<br />

Photo credits: Gina Fairley<br />

This quote by Turkish curator Levent Çalikoglu has a currency with this issue <strong>of</strong> <strong>Ctrl+P</strong><br />

and its dissection <strong>of</strong> the biennale as a global phenomenon. But more pointedly, it points<br />

to a recasting <strong>of</strong> ‘narrative’ as the geography <strong>of</strong> the biennale has changed suturing, if you<br />

like, its very ability to immerse <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> practice within a city and its audience<br />

with an equally recent phenomenon, the Asian <strong>art</strong> market. How these exhibitions broker<br />

notions <strong>of</strong> truth, geopolitics and culture as collateral to redefining perception and value<br />

requires examination.<br />

We all know the biennale was born with Venice in 1895. It is not its eurocentricity<br />

or position as the exemplary grand dame that interests me, rather its roots as a tourism<br />

initiative <strong>of</strong> the day. It is almost as though we have gone through the full motion <strong>of</strong> an<br />

inverted bell-curve, returning to that wide arching popularism with expo-style exhibitions<br />

hell-bent on attendance figures and crowd pleasers in the face <strong>of</strong> widespread competition.<br />

As the sociologist Pascal Gielen observes, “Afterall, [the biennale] fits easily in a<br />

neo-liberal city marketing strategy <strong>of</strong> so-called ‘creative cities’.” 2<br />

To compound this state <strong>of</strong> crisis, the biennale today is caught between a schizophrenic<br />

ricochet between the institutional white cube and the raw (un)familiar site, which<br />

has increasingly become a marketing chip to identifying and growing these events to<br />

local and international audiences. Layer that with a trend to package these exhibitions<br />

with other events and, understandably, their critical edges st<strong>art</strong> to blur. Just look at the<br />

most blatant example, the curated <strong>art</strong> fair Showcase Singapore housed within the biennale<br />

venue <strong>of</strong> City Hall. Is it ‘selling-out’ or ‘buying-in’? Furthermore, Singapore has<br />

established a trend to pair its biennale with spectacular events such as the World Monetary<br />

Fund meeting, the inaugural Formula 1 or the Youth Olympics in 2010. It pivots<br />

on the marketing concept <strong>of</strong> ‘added value’ where the sincere idealism<br />

<strong>of</strong> curatorial themes has been usurped by opportunism as their modus<br />

operandi. Is this simply an equation <strong>of</strong> accountability in today’s climate<br />

where funding sponsors and governments hold the ultimate strings? Or<br />

is it a more astute understanding <strong>of</strong> their primary audience post-vernissage?<br />

As Çalikoglu suggests, ‘…we should look at the validity <strong>of</strong> the<br />

language that gives it force.’<br />

Crowds versus crisis<br />

Hong Kong’s Asian Art Archive reports that today, there are over<br />

60 international biennials and triennials, the overwhelming majority<br />

<strong>of</strong> which began during the 1990s. 3 By my count, 25 <strong>of</strong> those are/were<br />

events held in Asia; that is more than one third and growing. That says<br />

more about these locations than the <strong>art</strong> they are showing. Take China<br />

for example. Before 1996 it didn’t have a single biennale; it reportedly<br />

now has seven. ArtZineChina’s report continues, “Four years ago<br />

there was only one <strong>art</strong> district—the 798 in Beijing; now seven cities<br />

around this country have <strong>art</strong> districts and Beijing alone enjoys nine <strong>art</strong><br />

districts. Art Galleries grew from less than 30 five years ago to at least<br />

300 at present. And five years ago, no more than five auction houses<br />

dealt with <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>, now at least fifty auctions houses have<br />

stepped into the <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> market…[In China] 70% <strong>of</strong> all collectors<br />

have emerged in only the last two years.” 4 This is definitely a<br />

growth industry.<br />

11 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Installation view “Best <strong>of</strong> Discovery”,<br />

SH<strong>contemporary</strong>08 <strong>art</strong> fair, Shanghai<br />

Photo credits: Gina Fairley<br />

Jing Shijian (China).“Express<br />

Train: Shanghai Biennale Station”<br />

(2008). Train car, rail, sleepers,<br />

video, 45 tonnes. Installation view<br />

7th Shanghai Biennale, 2008<br />

Photo credits: Gina Fairley<br />

This explosion is not specific to China. Between 2006 and 2008 the number <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong><br />

fairs rocketed with 50 held in 2008 alone; 21 <strong>of</strong> those were held in Asia. Former Editor<br />

at Art Asia Pacific Andrew Maerkle notes that, “…galleries from the Asia-Pacific region<br />

still represent less than 1% <strong>of</strong> international <strong>art</strong> fair exhibitors.” 5<br />

While this statistic may be true it does not reflect the number<br />

<strong>of</strong> Asian <strong>art</strong>ists shown at these events, regardless <strong>of</strong> the location<br />

<strong>of</strong> the gallery.<br />

What is more interesting than the global power structures<br />

<strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> fairs is the way they are redefining themselves, bridging<br />

if you like, biennales and auctions with curated components<br />

and commissioned works by ‘celebrity <strong>art</strong>ists’ featured within<br />

their selling halls. Shanghai’s SHContemporary, for example,<br />

calls theirs “Best <strong>of</strong> Discovery.” The choice <strong>of</strong> name says it all<br />

playing <strong>of</strong>f the speculation or savvy discovery <strong>of</strong> the new that<br />

has skewed the market <strong>of</strong> recent years. It is a curious tension<br />

between elite market drivers and popular interest.<br />

And with the growing trend <strong>of</strong> biennales and triennials<br />

to commission work for institutional collections—one only<br />

has to recall that the Fifth Asia Pacific Triennial commissioned<br />

or acquired 70% <strong>of</strong> its works prior to the exhibition’s<br />

opening—one ponders whether next we will have the ‘buying<br />

biennale’? One might even ask whether the biennale has<br />

hijacked <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> making, so thoroughly massaged and hyped that they have<br />

backed themselves into a corner <strong>of</strong> staged dialogues and price tickets, and <strong>art</strong> fairs are<br />

quickly filling the fissures.<br />

A further interesting trend is the shift in several <strong>of</strong> these Asian events from a locally<br />

focused survey <strong>of</strong> the ‘new’ addressing their own <strong>art</strong> scene to become International exhibitions<br />

turning towards global trends. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Taipei, Busan, Gwangju,<br />

Yogyak<strong>art</strong>a and Jak<strong>art</strong>a have all made this shift, the most recent being the XIII Jak<strong>art</strong>a<br />

Biennale just this February despite st<strong>art</strong>ing in the 1960s as a painting show. It indicates<br />

to me where these <strong>art</strong> scenes are setting their sites.<br />

Yongwoo Lee <strong>of</strong> last year’s Gwangju Biennale, however, disagrees. He speaks<br />

<strong>of</strong> Korea’s embrace <strong>of</strong> this biennalisation: “The biennale culture <strong>of</strong> Korea has already<br />

accumulated 13 years <strong>of</strong> experience and is constantly expanding, quantitatively. I do<br />

not believe that it comes from the system <strong>of</strong> the biennale or structure<br />

<strong>of</strong> global production it conveys...I anticipate the emergence <strong>of</strong> a new<br />

ideology and international styles <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> in the niches <strong>of</strong> the economic<br />

crisis and recess.” 6<br />

Lee believes the needs and local desires <strong>of</strong> individual nations are<br />

driving this beast. If the impact <strong>of</strong> the GEC can be weathered by these<br />

events and <strong>of</strong>fer a reshuffling the deck <strong>of</strong> speculators, their 2010 versions<br />

will be the real barometer to their longevity as a vital curatorial model.<br />

It begs the old question to again be asked: Who really are these Asian<br />

biennales for and how do we filter their curatorial choices?<br />

Remapping/geopolitics<br />

2008 was the year to catch the Asian biennale and I managed to do<br />

my share, regularly opting to see these exhibitions outside the ‘opening<br />

week caravan.’ What became apparent to me were two very different<br />

experiences <strong>of</strong> the same exhibition: One attempting to satisfy global <strong>art</strong><br />

vernacular; the other trying to grow these events to a local population.<br />

What currency does the voice <strong>of</strong> the nomadic curator have to this<br />

local population, where he or she steps centre stage for a short moment?<br />

As ‘the biennale’ has been deployed across cities and regions, these events<br />

increasingly are brokered on themes <strong>of</strong> social responsibility as witness to<br />

12 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Visitor’s watching video work at<br />

Shanghai Biennale 2008.<br />

Photo credits: Gina Fairley<br />

the boom <strong>of</strong> new engagement. The ‘political issue’ is inserted into their <strong>art</strong>istic agenda<br />

to in order to counter their genericism with local triggers. But do they become staged<br />

dialogues as a result? How can such themes bridge the cultural gaps between China,<br />

Havana and Sydney erstwhile catering to a local appetite? Perhaps the only way to do so<br />

is to bring them closer the endorsement <strong>of</strong> the global <strong>art</strong> market. Writer Jorinde Seijdel<br />

sums it up in his question, “…can biennials really represent an alternative political voice<br />

in these neo-political times?” 7<br />

Take for example the work Michael Rakowitz in the last Biennale <strong>of</strong> Sydney in<br />

the vestibule <strong>of</strong> the Art Gallery <strong>of</strong> New South Wales. Titled “White man got no dreaming”<br />

(2008) it is a model <strong>of</strong> Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International”<br />

using found materials from ‘the block’, the iconic site <strong>of</strong> urban Aboriginal Australia<br />

in the Sydney suburb <strong>of</strong> Redern. Rakowitz marries Tatlin’s symbol <strong>of</strong> revolutionary,<br />

visionary architecture <strong>of</strong> 1919 with Aboriginal housing, itself a failed ideal. Its presence<br />

in the AGNSW as symbol <strong>of</strong> white power is clear. However, the problem arises in that<br />

this piece overlays white ideals on black Australia and a culturally-specific issue that<br />

has nothing to do with the American Rakowitz. While a clever connection with Carolyn<br />

Christov-Bakargiev’s theme “Revolutions that turn,” one wonders whether it is more<br />

about contrived tensions endemic to ‘biennale <strong>art</strong>’ than <strong>contemporary</strong> revolution.<br />

This choice <strong>of</strong> curators to frame their exhibitions around historical or politically<br />

charged sites using them as a pawn to a reaction is not exclusive to Christov-Bakargiev—it<br />

has become the norm. Such tactics then beg the question in the light <strong>of</strong> Levent’s quote at<br />

the opening <strong>of</strong> this <strong>art</strong>icle, what is the more accurate narrative or truth: the <strong>contemporary</strong><br />

reality <strong>of</strong> the site or the reality constructed by the works? What could be argued is that<br />

biennales today are caught in a curatorial style that the <strong>art</strong> critic Gardner calls ‘google<br />

mulching: type in the word and see what graces the screen’. They have become overworked<br />

lessons in connectivity. Recall this run <strong>of</strong> works that Hou Hanru juxtaposed in the 10th<br />

Istanbul Biennale: Hamra Abbas’ karma sutra warriors and Huang Yong Ping’s minaret<br />

missile with AES+F’s grunge-glamour war-scape “Last Riot” and David Ter-Organyan’s<br />

domestic bombs. Little is left to the imagination. We are left with formulaic <strong>contemporary</strong><br />

works playing out prescribed geo-political and religious tensions.<br />

So why the necessity to force these exhibitions? Is it for press attention, curatorial<br />

indulgence, competitive edge or public awe? What could be argued is that these exhibitions<br />

have become microcosms <strong>of</strong> an idea that is quickly usurped by locals once the <strong>art</strong><br />

entourage has passed. It is a swift shift from polished rhetoric to mobile-phone-moments<br />

later to be posted on Facebook. The spectacular <strong>of</strong> the photo opportunity has replaced that<br />

<strong>of</strong> political hype. It is a very different engagement that has the same <strong>contemporary</strong> status<br />

as the latest must-have Gucci bag. This synergy is perhaps best illustrated by the scale<br />

<strong>of</strong> Beijing’s <strong>art</strong> gulches or, a more specific example,<br />

Shanghai Gallery <strong>of</strong> Art’s ritzy location in the same<br />

building as the elite boutiques <strong>of</strong> Armani and Hugo<br />

Boss along Shanghai’s fashionable Bund area. In the<br />

words <strong>of</strong> academic Thomas Berghuis: “The power <strong>of</strong><br />

cultural capital lies in its trouble-free expenditure, in<br />

its potential to be easily consumed. Chinese <strong>art</strong> now<br />

is comparable to Chinese takeaway: quick stir-fries,<br />

suitable to all tastes” 8<br />

Has the audience attention span become that<br />

eroded it needs constant stimulation or does this clutter<br />

<strong>of</strong> spectacular and scale and reflect a different reading<br />

<strong>of</strong> space within Asia where societies are more densely<br />

compacted? It is an interesting question and one that<br />

should be considered outside Western museological<br />

standards.<br />

What struck me most visiting Shanghai Biennale<br />

was the number <strong>of</strong> people clustered around the video<br />

13 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Poklong Anading. “Untitled (caskets)”<br />

Detail. Clear cast resin. XIII Jak<strong>art</strong>a<br />

Biennale 2009. Venue: Grand Indonesia.<br />

Image courtesy the <strong>art</strong>ist.<br />

installations, diligently watching them from st<strong>art</strong> to finish. They<br />

were hungry for this media. Maybe it indicates a generational shift;<br />

most <strong>art</strong>ists working today have only known a life with mobile<br />

phones, music videos and computers. Should we then be so critical<br />

<strong>of</strong> their fracture within an exhibition environment, when it is<br />

clearly a mapping <strong>of</strong> now?<br />

Next time you go to a biennale take a look at the audience as<br />

much as the <strong>art</strong>; it is only in understanding this that we can face<br />

these exhibitions with a more appropriate criticality. This idea<br />

brings and returns us to <strong>art</strong> fairs and the kind <strong>of</strong> hunger that feeds<br />

and fuses <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> events in our current global climate.<br />

I was astounded to see crowds snaking their way around the museum<br />

waiting to get in to view the Shanghai Biennale just days<br />

after record crowds had attended SH<strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> fair with the<br />

vigour <strong>of</strong> a flower or motor show as a popular weekend outing.<br />

The <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> audience is being redefined and perhaps so<br />

too are these events to reflect this. I recently gave a lecture on this<br />

topic at the National Art School in Sydney and a student asked, “Is<br />

audience a dirty word?” Is it? I would pr<strong>of</strong>ess it is king because<br />

without an engaged audience these <strong>art</strong> works fall hollow.<br />

Notes:<br />

1. Levent Çalikoglu, catalogue essay,<br />

“We are history’s hybrids” for the<br />

exhibition Hybrid Narratives at Akbank<br />

Sanat, Istanbul [Turkey], September 2007<br />

2. Pascal Gielen, “The Biennale:<br />

A Post-Institution for Immaterial Labour”<br />

published in in Open; http://www.skor.<br />

nl/<strong>art</strong>icle-4113-en.html<br />

3. Asian Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org.<br />

hk/onlineprojects/bitri/en/index.aspx<br />

4. Zhu Gi’s <strong>art</strong>icle from ArtZineChina<br />

published in Art in Asia No. 8, 2008,<br />

pp. <strong>15</strong>8-<strong>15</strong>9.<br />

5. Art Asia Pacific Alamanc 2009, p. 88.<br />

6. Yongwoo Lee, “Discourse production<br />

frame and biennale culture”, published in<br />

Art in Asia (Korea), Jan 09, p. 68.<br />

7. Jorinde Seijdel, editorial Open5, 2009,<br />

http://www.skor.nl/<strong>art</strong>icle-4058-en.html]<br />

8. Thomas J. Berghuis, “China: We<br />

Love You!”, <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>, <strong>Issue</strong> No. 11,<br />

March 08, p. 30.<br />

9. Dana Friis-Hansen,TransCulture<br />

catalogue essay p114, published in Lee<br />

Weng Choy’s <strong>art</strong>icle “A Taste for Worms<br />

and Roses,” Published by Artspace<br />

Sydney critical issues series 7, 2006. p. 9.<br />

10. Brian Holmes http://www.skor.nl/<strong>art</strong>icle-4112-en.html<br />

1997 : 2008 : 2010<br />

The American curator Dana Friss-Hansen wrote, “…[work]<br />

which <strong>of</strong>ten engages the metaphoric possibilities <strong>of</strong> common, locally available objects,<br />

reflects upon the shifting constructions <strong>of</strong> order, categories, and meaning—p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the<br />

complex, layered experience <strong>of</strong> so many Asian lives.” (9.)<br />

While Friss-Hansen was specifically referring to the work <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ist Simryn Gill, it<br />

has a synergy to this conversation and to works such as Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s<br />

that adapt well to a biennale vernacular for their ability to touch local audiences and<br />

more recently, Poklong Anading’s work in the XIII Jak<strong>art</strong>a Biennale (JB09). Anading’s<br />

installation at the Grand Indonesia Mall expanded his “Casket” series (2008-09), discarded<br />

packaging cast in resin. In the context <strong>of</strong> this ritzy Western-styled mall, Anading<br />

challenged notions <strong>of</strong> reuse and aspirational society, a pun presented as a ‘climbing<br />

wall.’ And with the fading trend <strong>of</strong> the past decade to place galleries within malls, it also<br />

comments on the commodification <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>. JB09 gets it right in the placement <strong>of</strong> work<br />

specific to its audiences and venues and with great clarity its curators also tackled the<br />

commodification <strong>of</strong> the biennale.<br />

In the light <strong>of</strong> today’s economic crisis it should be remembered that it was the<br />

economic and geopolitical conditions following the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis under<br />

which most <strong>of</strong> these Asian biennales were formed and flourished. My curiosity is perked<br />

to see what the 2010 editions <strong>of</strong> these events will present with a winding back <strong>of</strong> budgets<br />

and deflating spectacular. I return to the question I posed at the st<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> this <strong>art</strong>icle: as the<br />

market recedes but popular interest in <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> continues to have a ferocious<br />

appetite across Asia, how will these events morph and fuse to cater to popular demands?<br />

To conclude with Brian Holmes statement, “Neoliberalism is dead. Now we have to wake<br />

up to the world <strong>of</strong> regions” 10 seems most apt.<br />

14 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


eliza tan<br />

The 53rd Venice Biennale<br />

Fare Mondi, Making Worlds<br />

Venice, 5 June 2009—High tide has submerged a width <strong>of</strong> pavement near the Rialto,<br />

where one <strong>of</strong> the Venice Biennale opening p<strong>art</strong>ies was held just the night before. A<br />

woman squeals at the novelty <strong>of</strong> the sight and has her souvenir picture taken against a<br />

misty backdrop <strong>of</strong> looming piazzi and vaporettos chugging across the dark canal. Stray<br />

groups <strong>of</strong> tourists loiter around the detritus-strewn square, fresh beers in hand, ready for<br />

yet another night <strong>of</strong> revelry. “What a pre-apocalyptical vision.” A friend turns to me to<br />

suggest, pointing to a distant piazzo from which strange blue lights and blaring dance<br />

music emanates. “It’s almost as if everyone’s out to have their last hoorah in this postcard<br />

city, this fast-sinking skeleton <strong>of</strong> a nostalgic world.”<br />

Richard Wentworth. Untitled (2009)<br />

at the Arsenale. Photo credits: Eliza Tan<br />

Curated Sections: The Arsenale and the Giardini<br />

Rescuing the observable present for the future is Director Daniel Birmbaum’s<br />

prescription for this year’s Venice Biennale: “When Fare Mondi, Making Worlds brings<br />

back expressions from a recent past, it is never for nostalgic reasons but in order to<br />

find tools for the future and to make possible new beginnings.” Nostalgia aside, such a<br />

curatorial agenda delivers no surprises from the outset. The utopian impulse underlying<br />

Birmbaum’s statement rings like an old adage, coupled with all too familiar rhetoric on<br />

<strong>art</strong> production in a state <strong>of</strong> globalization. Making Worlds addresses the relevant but in<br />

a far too sweeping and general sense without actually inspiring anything perspectivally<br />

fresh or, for lack <strong>of</strong> a better word, ‘new’; more <strong>of</strong> an emphasis could also be made on the<br />

re-making, and not just making <strong>of</strong> worlds. In this respect, Robert Storr for the previous<br />

biennale, had adopted a far more triumphant and tempered approach with Think with the<br />

Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, challenging a re-adjustment <strong>of</strong> our<br />

attitudes towards <strong>art</strong>, the non-linearity <strong>of</strong> history and contemporaneity.<br />

To Birmbaum’s credit, the curated segments <strong>of</strong> the Arsenale and Giardini flow at a<br />

good pace, providing narrative roundness and accessibility. The exhibition at the Arsenale<br />

begins and ends neatly with Anya Zholud’s site-specific installation and drawings,<br />

which quietly expose the building’s electric cables, allowing invisible communication<br />

processes to assume a materiality. The overall tone <strong>of</strong> the exhibition remains clean and<br />

consistent throughout, with a modest but solid selection <strong>of</strong> works which mostly shy<br />

away from ostentation. It is likely that this owes p<strong>art</strong>ially to the $1.4 million biennale<br />

budget cut this year, but it is quite a relief<br />

to see a somewhat less spectacular biennale<br />

for a change, where works can just ‘be’, in<br />

concert with a privileging <strong>of</strong> ideas and forms.<br />

Richard Wentworth’s phenomenological<br />

experiment with walking sticks on glass<br />

panes, for instance, exemplifies a restrained<br />

elegance and poetic pragmatism, as does<br />

Ceal Floyer’s concise and deceptively simple<br />

Overgrowth, a magnified projection <strong>of</strong> the<br />

miniature Bonsai tree.<br />

Even larger scaled works appear reserved;<br />

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s roomful<br />

<strong>of</strong> ornately framed mirrors, the relics <strong>of</strong> his<br />

performance Seventeen Less One where the<br />

<strong>art</strong>ist smashed the surfaces with a mallet,<br />

makes a strong but not radical impact. Lygia<br />

<strong>15</strong> <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Pape’s rare Ttéia I, C , comprising <strong>of</strong> translucent blocks <strong>of</strong> curtained light in a pitch dark<br />

room won the <strong>art</strong>ist a special mention under the Re-making Worlds prize category, and<br />

is an exquisite visual treat. Displaced quotidian matter and events otherwise make up<br />

the material <strong>of</strong> works such as Tamara Gricic’s life rafts, floating outside the Arsenale to<br />

its own soundtrack, or Sara Ramo’s video <strong>of</strong> a series <strong>of</strong> little events unfolding against a<br />

non-descript red brick wall.<br />

At times, works seemed too directly illustrative <strong>of</strong> Making Worlds, or too literal;<br />

Pascale M<strong>art</strong>hine Tayou’s Human Being, a hybrid re-creation <strong>of</strong> a small African village,<br />

is one example. Anawana Haloba’s street advertising kiosk, which addresses the double<br />

standards <strong>of</strong> G8 foreign aid policies and free trade agreements, comes across as an ambiguous<br />

crossover between a DIY project and make-shift recycling centre. In contrast,<br />

Gonkar Gyatso’s The Shambala in Modern Times, a re-presentation <strong>of</strong> traditional Thangka<br />

paintings using “cutesy” stickers and icons <strong>of</strong> popular culture, combines visual innovation<br />

with subtle, yet effective social-political commentary.<br />

Paul Chan’s captivating Sade for Sade’s Sake in the Arsenale revives the ancient<br />

theatre <strong>of</strong> rhythmic shadow-play in his invocation <strong>of</strong> the Marquis de Sade’s writing.<br />

This concept is elsewhere reiterated, albeit to a different effect, in Hans Peter Feldman’s<br />

mesmerizing Shadow Play in The Palazzo at the Giardini. On the overall, the placement,<br />

pairings and juxtaposition <strong>of</strong> works across both the Arsenale and Giardini establishes<br />

relatively neat symmetries and there is some satisfaction to be derived from such curatorial<br />

coherence, even if this transpires into a bland presentation.<br />

National Pavilions<br />

Artists’ showcases from p<strong>art</strong>icipating countries proved, as usual, to be the mainstay<br />

<strong>of</strong> opening day discussions. Setting the stage for Miwa Yanagi’s darkly ambivalent and<br />

uncanny Windswept Women: The Old Girl’s Troupe, an unreservedly hysterical affront to<br />

the proverbial, libidinally-driven “old boys club,” is a black, carnivalesque tent shrouding<br />

the Japan Pavilion. Inside the tent, giant-sized black-and-white photographs <strong>of</strong> monstrous<br />

looking women with twisted bodies shriek and stomp against what appears to be primitive-futuristic<br />

landscape. A miniature version <strong>of</strong> the black tent sits in a corner, and one<br />

is invited to stoop and peer in to watch a video <strong>of</strong> this nomadic tribe, outcasts performing<br />

their private rituals. Compared to the highly color-saturated, futuristic fantasy <strong>of</strong> Yanagi’s<br />

perfectly manicured and uniformed Elevator Girls from the mid-90s, “pretty” is clearly not<br />

the point here. A surreal but memorable installation tethering on the bizarre, Windswept<br />

Women plunges into the fictional re-creation <strong>of</strong> society and power hierarchies, extending<br />

also the theatrical macabre <strong>of</strong> Yanagi’s Fairy Tale series, an inversion <strong>of</strong> stories such as<br />

Snow White and Cinderella.<br />

Presentations from Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand return perennially, and inescapably<br />

so, to current affairs on tourism, immigration and identity. The Thai Pavilion’s<br />

mock tourism company made a rather sketchy and unconvincing impression compared<br />

to the delicate yet gravitatious presentation by Nipan Oranniwesna and Amrit Chusuwan<br />

in 2007. Works in the Taiwan Pavilion, on the other hand, compellingly confront issues<br />

regarding the nation’s status in relation to China, housing conditions, immigration processes<br />

and the interplay <strong>of</strong> ideological stances against a backdrop <strong>of</strong> neo-liberalist globalization.<br />

Communicating such concerns through personalized expressions and individual<br />

narratives, the works provide a timely and pertinent investigation into the possibilities<br />

<strong>of</strong> cross-regional interactions or ‘dialogism,’ as curator Chang Fang-wei cites. Foreign<br />

Affairs not only sparks further consideration <strong>of</strong> the collisions and confluences <strong>of</strong> intraregional<br />

and inter-continental movement, the presentation also demonstrates the modes<br />

<strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>istic exchange deriving from such conversation.<br />

Through an excavation <strong>of</strong> local cinematic history, Ming Wong’s Life <strong>of</strong> Imitation<br />

at the Singapore Pavilion attempts to unpack the singularity <strong>of</strong> <strong>of</strong>ficialised narratives on<br />

multi-culturalism while also referring to unspoken yet still persistent cultural stereotypes<br />

and stigmatisms. The photographs <strong>of</strong> demolished theatres, Wong Han Ming’s archive<br />

<strong>of</strong> old cinema tickets and the canvases painted by the last surviving billboard painter in<br />

Singapore, Neo Chon Teck, succeed in evoking a recognisable sense <strong>of</strong> 50s-60s nostalgia.<br />

16 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Billboard poster painted by Neo Chon<br />

Teck at the Singapore Pavilion for Ming<br />

Wong’s Life <strong>of</strong> Imitation<br />

Together with Ming’s video works, which employ a versatile cast <strong>of</strong> multi-ethnic actors,<br />

this sense <strong>of</strong> nostalgia, coupled with the use <strong>of</strong> clichés and melodrama as an inverse device,<br />

also conveys undercurrents <strong>of</strong> historical and cultural repression. Ming’s appropriation<br />

<strong>of</strong> Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation <strong>of</strong> Life, for instance, uncovers the slippery layers <strong>of</strong><br />

racial, sexual and gender constructs, where Sarah Jane, played here by two different male<br />

leads in drag, is forced to negotiate her ‘blackness’ while simultaneously pronouncing<br />

her ‘whiteness.’ Nevertheless, a consideration <strong>of</strong> Imitation <strong>of</strong> Life should not be a mere<br />

regurgitation <strong>of</strong> post-colonial <strong>art</strong>iculations pertaining solely to dislocated identities, ‘third<br />

spaces’ and localisms. These concerns are as intrinsic as they are important, but it is by<br />

extension productive to reflect on how the margins <strong>of</strong> discourse on historical memory,<br />

the ‘<strong>of</strong>’ and ‘from’ a nation, together with the aesthetic forms which emerge as an expression<br />

<strong>of</strong> such, will continue to surface and evolve variously in form, address and content.<br />

Entrenchment in the self-same identity complex, a process <strong>of</strong> infinite mirroring which<br />

can be a trapping in itself, is otherwise the risk.<br />

Rather than explicitly underscoring anxieties <strong>of</strong> ‘foreignness,’ Pak Sheung Chuen’s<br />

Making (Perfect) World at the Hong Kong Pavilion takes a refreshing approach anchored<br />

on the notion <strong>of</strong> ‘place’ as an aesthetic gesture, (dis)placement and adaptation as conceptual<br />

processes. Showcasing a collection <strong>of</strong><br />

photographs, video works, objects and small<br />

installations which document the subtle interactions<br />

undertaken by Pak in locations ranging<br />

from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Tokyo, Korea<br />

and back to Venice, the <strong>art</strong>ist has mapped a<br />

psycho-geography <strong>of</strong>, and beyond Hong Kong<br />

as a harbor and city. Amongst the works, Pak<br />

re-imagines the measurement and notion <strong>of</strong><br />

‘one’ sea from out <strong>of</strong> a public library in New<br />

York, linking up every book featuring coastal<br />

horizons from cover to cover, to form a shape<br />

<strong>of</strong> a sea. Waiting for Everyone to Fall Asleep<br />

presents a quiet serenade to the residents <strong>of</strong> a<br />

building in Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po, their<br />

activities reflected only through their window<br />

lights. The poetics <strong>of</strong> Pak’s personal and selfreflexive<br />

gestures in every instance serve as<br />

meditations on the unobserved, pointing also to<br />

the elasticity <strong>of</strong> borders and states <strong>of</strong> cognition.<br />

Modernity in Asia, a complex and perpetually<br />

transitional trajectory <strong>of</strong> local and global environments,<br />

competing and coalescing cultural<br />

forms, is thus contemplated with an open, rather<br />

than reductive end. The <strong>art</strong>ist here functions not<br />

as a disengaged observer, but as an itinerant<br />

p<strong>art</strong>icipant seeking to negotiate connections<br />

between contradicting elements inherent in day<br />

to day life, its micro-politics indirectly creating an outlet for reflection <strong>of</strong> national and<br />

transnational identities.<br />

Works by familiar names, Fang Lijun, Zeng Fanzhi and Qiu Zhijie amongst seven<br />

other <strong>art</strong>ists, including the Liu Ding <strong>art</strong>ist group, did not generate much hype at the<br />

China Pavilion, a stark contrast from the nation’s first p<strong>art</strong>icipation in 2005, when Cai<br />

Guo Qiang bagged the Golden Lion award. Where addressing commerce and a utopian<br />

future has been taken up by the Chinese yet again, the Russian Pavilion’s Victory Over the<br />

Future recalls the 1913 Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun by Alexei Kruchonykh, its<br />

set designed at the time by Kazimir Malevich. A re-examination <strong>of</strong> the existing tensions<br />

between legacies <strong>of</strong> the Russian avant-garde, individual and societal behaviors as well<br />

as fears <strong>of</strong> economic or environmental catastrophe beyond the 21st century makes for an<br />

17 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Installation view from the Danish<br />

Pavilion at the Danish & Nordic<br />

Pavilions, Giardini. Photo credits:<br />

Eliza Tan<br />

Bruce Nauman’s Fifteen Pairs <strong>of</strong> Hands<br />

(1996) at the American Pavilion in the<br />

Giardini. Photo credits: Eliza Tan<br />

ambitious showcase <strong>of</strong> works. Elsewhere,<br />

Shaun Gladwell’s MADDESTMAXIMVS:<br />

Planet & Stars Sequence at the Australian<br />

Pavilion resonates with an incisive<br />

sense <strong>of</strong> presentness, noteworthy for<br />

his ingenuous transpositions <strong>of</strong> painting<br />

and sculpture onto video, addressing the<br />

expansive possibilities <strong>of</strong> medium and<br />

material.<br />

The Danish and Nordic Pavilion’s<br />

creatively curated, post-utopian presentation<br />

by Elmgreen and Dragset, The<br />

Collectors, has gained near unanimous<br />

popularity. Staged as a piece <strong>of</strong> real estate<br />

put up for auction further to the ‘Death<br />

<strong>of</strong> a Collector,’ The Collectors presents<br />

a cool critique <strong>of</strong> “living in a magazine;”<br />

the epitomized, modernist ambition<br />

projected upon <strong>contemporary</strong> life but<br />

which unravels from within—makes for<br />

its immediacy. The ‘collector’s’ suicide<br />

is evidenced by a body afloat in a pool<br />

before the house. In the Nordic Pavilion, a live male nude lounges on an Arne Jacobson<br />

OX chair and a pair <strong>of</strong> boys sit listening to music together amidst works celebrating a<br />

homo-erotic aesthetic but which also simultaneously question stereotyped images <strong>of</strong> gay<br />

men. In the Danish Pavilion, the neighbouring wing <strong>of</strong> the collector’s mansion, objects<br />

including Fredrik Sjöberg’s Fly Collection and Massimo De Carlo’s Porcelain Collection<br />

reveal a portrait <strong>of</strong> their absent owner. A <strong>contemporary</strong> rendition on the various identities<br />

<strong>of</strong> ‘the collector’, the presentation follows in the vein <strong>of</strong> Walter Benjamin’s portrait <strong>of</strong><br />

the collector as bourgeois, fetishistic, a historical materialist in the literal sense, and an<br />

allegorist all at once.<br />

Other highlights <strong>of</strong> the Biennale include<br />

Steve McQueen’s video installation<br />

for the British Pavilion, a ghostly and melancholic<br />

evocation <strong>of</strong> the Giardini desolate<br />

in winter, at a time when it could be said to<br />

be at its rawest and most beautiful, uninhabited<br />

by the biennale spectacle. McQueen’s<br />

presentation received a great many more<br />

thumbs up from British audiences in Venice<br />

this year, as compared previously to Tracey<br />

Emin. Since there was a capacity limit and<br />

p<strong>art</strong>icular screening times at the pavilion,<br />

the main disappointment for many during<br />

the opening days, was being turned away<br />

after queuing for hours for a ticket. Topological<br />

Gardens, Bruce Nauman’s showcase<br />

at the American Pavilion celebrates<br />

an encore <strong>of</strong> his contributions to <strong>art</strong> history,<br />

including groundbreaking works from the<br />

60s such as From Hand to Mouth, The True<br />

Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic<br />

Truths (1967), and videos from the 90s.<br />

Days (2009), Nauman’s sound installation<br />

for the biennale, comprises an aisle flanked<br />

by white sound boards from which emanate<br />

18 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


voices pronouncing the days <strong>of</strong> the week in English and Italian, echoing the conceptual<br />

thread running through the spectrum <strong>of</strong> his work from past to present.<br />

What Else Can We Talk About, Teresa Margolle’s piece at the Mexican Pavilion<br />

proved to be one <strong>of</strong> the most talked about works. Addressing a history <strong>of</strong> crime and<br />

violence, Pavilion attendants are seen mopping the floors <strong>of</strong> the Pavilion with a mixture<br />

<strong>of</strong> water and the blood <strong>of</strong> murder victims. Given Margolle’s reputation for using bodily<br />

p<strong>art</strong>s and fluids in her <strong>art</strong>, one is still left wondering how blood might have been in<br />

reality obtained and exported for this heavy work. The piece nonetheless invokes the<br />

traces <strong>of</strong> violence, death’s invisibility and the burden <strong>of</strong> social responsibility through the<br />

simple gesture <strong>of</strong> mopping, here transformed into a powerful political metaphor for the<br />

simultaneous erasure and ‘staining’ <strong>of</strong> identities.<br />

In the aftermath <strong>of</strong> the manic opening days <strong>of</strong> the Biennale, it is perhaps only on<br />

hindsight that one can better appreciate the critical resonances <strong>of</strong> this year’s fare and the<br />

varying forms <strong>of</strong> worlds present, past and future which the works seek to express. Yet,<br />

I am not entirely certain that any <strong>of</strong> the works in the Biennale really set out to ‘make a<br />

world’ at all but rather, to hold a globe up to the light and turning that sphere under the<br />

light, to scrutinize the world for what it appears to be now in order to understand its present<br />

nature. At the Czech Pavilion, Roman Ondák’s Loop unassumingly questions what we<br />

currently perceive in our immediate present and the tendency to borrow from, rather than<br />

to invest in a future. Collapsing notions <strong>of</strong> the present with that <strong>of</strong> the future, the pavilion<br />

replicates its external ecology—the surrounding trees, plants and foliage surrounding the<br />

Giardini have been planted inside the pavilion. One might almost walk right through,<br />

and past it in a rush to look for what else is on show without noticing the work. That is,<br />

until you stop, take in a breath <strong>of</strong> fresh air and realize that this is the <strong>art</strong>, the world as it<br />

has already been made and its current composition, and how it continues to exist as far<br />

as it is re-envisioned according to how we relate to it from the here and now.<br />

Roman Ondák’s Loop (2009) at the<br />

Czech Pavilion in the Giardini.<br />

Photo credits: Eliza Tan<br />

19 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


patrick d. flores<br />

Object Lessons from Gwangju<br />

It was late December in 2007 when I got an email from Okwui Enwezor inviting me to be<br />

p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> a section <strong>of</strong> the 7th Gwangju Biennale he was directing with two curators in the<br />

year that was to commence. I knew <strong>of</strong> Okwui through his work in criticism, theory, and<br />

exhibition making, and I found his disposition toward curation uniquely sharp, responsive,<br />

and venturesome. The opportunity to work with him was an important moment in my<br />

own efforts in the field, and to renew ties with one <strong>of</strong> the curators, the Indian poet and<br />

critic Ranjit Hoskote, with whom I had worked in the past in exhibitions, conferences,<br />

and publications, was something not to be missed.<br />

The invitation also came at a time when friend and colleague Joselina Cruz was<br />

appointed as one <strong>of</strong> the curators <strong>of</strong> the 2nd Singapore Biennale, which was to open days<br />

away from Gwangju in 2008. Yeyey, as the local <strong>art</strong> world calls her, is the first Philippine<br />

curator to be p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> a curatorium <strong>of</strong> an exhibition <strong>of</strong> the biennale mode. I thought that<br />

these appointments were carving out vital space for curators in the country: here, they<br />

could practice within a wider ambit and in conversation with denser layers <strong>of</strong> curatorial<br />

and <strong>art</strong>istic issues.<br />

Also, the Gwangju episode allowed me to pursue other trajectories <strong>of</strong> curation.<br />

I had previous experience with slightly different structures <strong>of</strong> international curation. For<br />

the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia in 1999, I was a co-curator for<br />

the Philippines with the Australian <strong>art</strong>ist and critic Pat H<strong>of</strong>fie. In the same year, I was<br />

the curator <strong>of</strong> the Philippine Pavilion at the First Melbourne Biennale. And from 2000 to<br />

2003, I worked with eight curators from seven Asian countries for the Under Construction:<br />

New Dimensions in Asian Art project under the auspices <strong>of</strong> the Japan Foundation.<br />

In these forays, the focus was either representation <strong>of</strong> an <strong>art</strong> world or exploration <strong>of</strong><br />

energy <strong>of</strong> <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>. But for Gwangju, I had more latitude to link up my research<br />

in curation in Southeast Asia, my theoretical reflections on <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>, and the<br />

actual practice <strong>of</strong> curation within a biennale context under the directorship <strong>of</strong> a wellknown<br />

curator from Nigeria based in the United States. Clearly, there was a discernible<br />

post-colonial critique in this sortie, but one that would be inflected with a reconsideration<br />

<strong>of</strong> radical political strategy or democratic discourse evoked by the site itself, Gwangju,<br />

in which an uprising in May 1980 helped topple a tenacious dictatorship and sparked<br />

the minjung movement. The specter <strong>of</strong> the minjung would be raised by Okwui as a foil<br />

to the privileged totem <strong>of</strong> rupture in Europe, the May 1968 student protest and strike in<br />

France. These historical coordinates are salient in trying to understand the foundations<br />

<strong>of</strong> <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> or any other critical modernities that p<strong>art</strong>ly arose from resistance<br />

to authority, norm, establishment, and master narrative. That Okwui was insistent on<br />

this thoroughgoing theoretical discussion (workshops, seminars, and a thick catalogue)<br />

invested the biennale with a robust theoretical framework, a commitment that was quite<br />

absent in the other eight biennales that opened in the same season <strong>of</strong> the year in Asia.<br />

This was an unprecedented ascendancy <strong>of</strong> exhibition making in the region, prompting<br />

some observers to herald an Asian century.<br />

The section for which I was asked to contribute was called Position Papers,<br />

which was a series <strong>of</strong> five small-scale curatorial projects initiated by five curators with<br />

divergent persuasions, from the enigmatic to the carnivalesque. We were given a free hand<br />

to propose anything; and this liberty was key to conceiving unpredictable, uneven, and<br />

idiosyncratic platforms. The section was meant to create another level to the biennale,<br />

which consisted <strong>of</strong> an anthology <strong>of</strong> the previous year’s exhibitions and commissions for<br />

specific sites in Gwangju. Our section had a more vertical orientation as it tried to probe<br />

certain impulses in <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> without regard for the new and the now.<br />

I proposed Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator, a discussion <strong>of</strong> the practice <strong>of</strong> four<br />

germinal figures in Southeast Asia who st<strong>art</strong>ed out as <strong>art</strong>ists <strong>of</strong> an avant garde inclination<br />

and then became pioneering independent curators in their respective <strong>art</strong> worlds: Jim<br />

Supangkat <strong>of</strong> Indonesia, Apinan Poshyananda <strong>of</strong> Thailand, Redza Piyadasa <strong>of</strong> Malaysia,<br />

20 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


and Raymundo Albano <strong>of</strong> the Philippines. This exhibition <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> works, texts, and documentation<br />

<strong>of</strong> curatorial initiations surfaced a range <strong>of</strong> problematics: the role <strong>of</strong> the hybrid<br />

personage like the <strong>art</strong>ist-curator; the transformation <strong>of</strong> the trope <strong>of</strong> curator in makeshift<br />

modernities, and the intimation <strong>of</strong> a discourse <strong>of</strong> the avant-garde in Southeast Asia.<br />

Okwui titled the biennale Annual Report. It was not framed by any theme. In fact,<br />

he would say that there is in the present a crisis in thematic exhibitions: the biennale<br />

could be an occasion for a pause or an introspection as well as a retrospection. I think my<br />

proposal fit into this scheme, because it was in the same vein a way <strong>of</strong> looking back at the<br />

seventies in Southeast Asia, the Cold War, the formation <strong>of</strong> civil society and democracy,<br />

and the heady times <strong>of</strong> the nineties when exhibitions in Asia and the Pacific began to<br />

draft their own c<strong>art</strong>ographies. According to Okwui,<br />

These exhibitions, proposals, processions, and activities can be understood<br />

as a chain <strong>of</strong> traveling cultural worlds and idioms; a network <strong>of</strong> incommensurable<br />

experiments in global culture within the <strong>contemporary</strong> calendar.<br />

Whether originating from a shopping mall, a folk theater, a makeshift display<br />

in neigh borhood, alternative gallery systems, non-pr<strong>of</strong>it institutions, local<br />

cultural centers, or the commercial gallery circuit, <strong>art</strong> fairs, museums,<br />

festivals, and a wide array <strong>of</strong> exhibition systems and spaces, the biennale’s<br />

goals is to illuminate the adventure-time and everyday localities <strong>of</strong> contempo<br />

rary <strong>art</strong>istic practice…In presenting these exhibitions, proposals, and projects,<br />

the biennale does not aim for one singular dominant vision, nor will it assume<br />

any sense <strong>of</strong> grandiose authorship. But by linking together the work <strong>of</strong> many<br />

curators, <strong>art</strong>ists, institutions, and galleries, the objective is to achieve within<br />

the biennale a forum <strong>of</strong> collective authorship.<br />

Ray Albano. Step on the Sand and<br />

Make Footprints. (a reconstruction).<br />

Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator<br />

exhibition, 7th Gwangju Biennale, 2008.<br />

Photo courtesy <strong>of</strong> Gwangju Biennale<br />

It was propitious that Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator was presented beside the<br />

Whitney Museum retrospective <strong>of</strong> Gordon Matta-Clark, another eccentric <strong>art</strong>ist who<br />

intuited everyday life in Manhattan through architectural interventions. With this tangent,<br />

the whole notion <strong>of</strong> conceptualism across <strong>art</strong> worlds gained new depth, and not because<br />

<strong>of</strong> a provincial <strong>art</strong>iculation from Southeast Asia, a vernacular variation, as it were, but<br />

because <strong>of</strong> an equivalent locution from an alternative vantage.<br />

21 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Joselina cruz<br />

Signs <strong>of</strong> Wonder<br />

How can I not ask this: isn’t good laughter born from the<br />

“wonder <strong>of</strong> the event?”That is to say, the event where something is becoming<br />

and which <strong>of</strong>fers us the experience <strong>of</strong>, as Michael Serres would say, “the immense,<br />

sparkling, holy joy <strong>of</strong> having to think.” (Lomax, 2000, pxii)<br />

When I was asked to work on the second Singapore Biennale, all the missteps that I had<br />

seen and critiqued regarding the first, as well as the criticisms that surrounded biennales<br />

which I had shored up all these years came rushing to the fore. All the criticisms, especially<br />

that <strong>of</strong> the biennale being staged together with the International Monetary Fund<br />

meeting, were problems I was determined to resist and desist. The rate <strong>of</strong> my success in<br />

resistance was dismal.<br />

The circumstances <strong>of</strong> the curatorial team’s coming together was a highly balanced<br />

decision, with Fumio Nanjo’s continuation as <strong>art</strong>istic director, being an especially important<br />

key at giving the biennale the necessary steam to forge into the second. Nanjo-san<br />

was the epitome <strong>of</strong> the regional internationalist, with as many biennales tucked under<br />

his belt as the number <strong>of</strong> biennales that ran for that year throughout the region. Matthew<br />

Ngui was deeply respected by the Singaporean <strong>art</strong> community as both <strong>art</strong>ist and curator,<br />

having been p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> important international exhibitions (Documenta and Cities on the<br />

Move to name a few); these made him perfect for the post. Finally, I had some curatorial<br />

experience, I was also familiar with Southeast Asia as my specialisation and interest, and<br />

more importantly, I had previously worked in Singapore.<br />

With the Singapore Biennale 2008 (SB2008), I found myself with the opportunity<br />

to work on a new scale, and with more demanding parameters that had to be thought<br />

through more critically and more reflexively. Despite the intense 18 months that we<br />

worked on for the Biennale, the space for reflection is still only, ever, after the fact. The<br />

months before the biennale where marked by a relentless pace that seemed to be at the<br />

he<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the process. I was coiled within a machine wherein days rolled into weeks and<br />

weeks churned out months quickly. It was an appalling luxury to find myself immersed<br />

and sucked into becoming a mere cog <strong>of</strong> biennale-making. Rupture is a difficult strategy.<br />

And <strong>of</strong>ten a strategy that backfires when set within an ossified system. The platform <strong>of</strong><br />

a biennale is like that <strong>of</strong> a gelatinous substance. You see yourself and everyone else in<br />

place, but very few within can move except with labored motions. The biennale structure<br />

allows very few <strong>of</strong> its proponents the ability for true criticality without sacrificing the<br />

exhibitionary aspect <strong>of</strong> the enterprise. Despite Marian Pastor-Roces’s extolling Havana’s<br />

interesting position (which positioned itself as the Third World Biennale), Havana is<br />

still located within the confines <strong>of</strong> the biennale bind (“Crystal Palace Exhibitions” in<br />

Over Here, 2007). Biennales do not seem to have the ability to turn into itself and create<br />

self-reflexive exhibitions that continuously and successfully question the foundation on<br />

which it exists.<br />

Adding a layer to the difficulty <strong>of</strong> working within biennales is the fact that is Singapore.<br />

Singapore is a city with many troubling aspects underneath its shiny exterior,<br />

transparency being the least <strong>of</strong> its virtues. The structure <strong>of</strong> the city is framed strongly by<br />

its government, to quote:<br />

Singapore has constructed a veneer <strong>of</strong> democracy, development and<br />

freedom that largely insulate it from international criticism. While Singapore<br />

is a parliamentary democracy in name, the effectiveness <strong>of</strong> its democracy is<br />

undermined by the PAP’s rigorous controls over speech and the press.<br />

It is perhaps because <strong>of</strong> their economic prosperity that the people <strong>of</strong><br />

Singapore do not protest more at their exclusion from the political process.<br />

From a human rights stand point, however, the Western-style prosperity <strong>of</strong> the<br />

place makes denials <strong>of</strong> civil and political rights all the more <strong>of</strong>fensive. 1<br />

22 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Endnote<br />

1. http://www.singapore-window.<br />

org/sw02/020530hr.htm<br />

While such facts may be fodder for Human Rights activists, it makes for a very<br />

difficult position for criticality in <strong>art</strong> to subsist. So much so that other ideas have to be<br />

put into play for the site <strong>of</strong> the biennale to be activated. Fumio Nanjo’s two-edition<br />

thematic are, on the surface, seemingly benign conceptual plays on ideas. While I have<br />

misgivings regarding the trajectory <strong>of</strong> Belief, as it tends to be concretized on sites <strong>of</strong><br />

religion and politics, which then become the narrow sites wherein they are critiqued,<br />

Wonder however is an idea that sits itself within an abstract plane. One could argue that<br />

it could have been under any other guise, wonder however sits in both the intellect and<br />

the emotion and moves it. And its choice was made to introduce the lengths as which<br />

imagination could be stretched through the visual sphere.<br />

Imagination is what the Singapore has been deprived <strong>of</strong>, as imagination enables<br />

individuals to think beyond the possibilities what was presented them. Thus to allow<br />

intellect to happen upon imagination opens possibilities including that <strong>of</strong> the seemingly<br />

impossible. The Biennale sought to bring a variety <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> works which challenged this<br />

mindset and spur alternative thinking. Singapore is a peculiarly un-curious city. However,<br />

to pique an individual’s interest is a singular experience. I have always held on to the<br />

Plato’s adage that “philosophy begins with wonder.” Wonder asks questions. It deepens<br />

curiosity and allows the intellect to function and reach across actions which may have<br />

previously un-nerved us. I always saw the exhibition as more for the Singaporeans first,<br />

rather than the international audience. The most quiet and sublime <strong>of</strong> works may in the<br />

end be the most effective and influential, more than shock. Sometimes shock does not<br />

leave a lasting impression, whereas wonder or that <strong>of</strong> curiosity begets a more sublime<br />

psychological insinuation. Recently, the triumph <strong>of</strong> civil action took place in Singapore.<br />

When a fundamentalist Christian sect managed to infiltrate a progressive women’s group<br />

called AWARE, vigilant members <strong>of</strong> society took to action. The civil action that took place<br />

to change the governance <strong>of</strong> the group to one more plural and inclusive was a feat in the<br />

history <strong>of</strong> Singapore’s civil liberties. There was enough critical mass gathered to lead to<br />

a change <strong>of</strong> leadership, but more importantly, those who p<strong>art</strong>icipated (some 3000 people<br />

gathered in a state wherein five people need a permit to assemble) exemplified individual<br />

choices to become p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the discussion. While this may not be the effect <strong>of</strong> the exhibition,<br />

there is to my mind this connection <strong>of</strong> awe that this has happened. There are <strong>of</strong> course<br />

historical and social factors that galvanized and allowed for this event to occur, but are<br />

the subtle suggestions <strong>of</strong> mass action and insidious political action inherent in some <strong>of</strong><br />

the work suggestive <strong>of</strong> possibilities? I would like to think that despite this most tenuous<br />

connecting thread, <strong>art</strong> somehow contributed to the Singaporean collective subconscious,<br />

no matter how miniscule. It was truly, to say the least, a wonder <strong>of</strong> an event.<br />

gerry coulter<br />

Lisa Yuskavage<br />

Lisa Yuskavage (47) is an American painter from Philadelphia who took her MFA at Yale<br />

in 1986. Since the early 1990s she has enjoyed increasing success in the <strong>art</strong> world: several<br />

solo shows in prestigious venues in recent years; her works reside in top collections<br />

(including MOMA, New York); and recently her paintings have topped the one million<br />

dollar mark at auction. 1 By any reasonable standard for “<strong>art</strong> world success” Yuskavage’s<br />

star shines bright. I think her work is a success which is very much deserved as much<br />

for the discussions it has generated as for what is skillfully enacts on its canvases (oil<br />

on linen).<br />

Like a number <strong>of</strong> the “old masters” she produces pictures at the rate <strong>of</strong> about five<br />

per year. Described as “technically ambitious (Lovelace, 2001),” her works brilliantly<br />

mock the male gaze (if it can get past the initial embarrassment) (see also Scott, 2006).<br />

Her oils are deeply thoughtful and very delicate paintings which have undergone meticulous<br />

preparation. Yuskavage scrupulously attempts to keep at bay the unintended<br />

23 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


and this lends to her work something I am less fond <strong>of</strong>—their calculated<br />

quality. She makes many drawings as well as three dimensional models.<br />

She is deeply concerned with light and distance for which she uses both<br />

live models and photographs before she begins to draw.<br />

This essay examines her <strong>art</strong> and how its thought provoking nature<br />

speaks so well to our time, and the way it raises provocative questions as:<br />

“If you had never seen her work before and I showed it to you saying it<br />

was painted by a man—would your response to it be different than if you<br />

looked at it knowing she were a woman?” What is said about the woman<br />

who paints (mainly) female nudes speaks volumes about the limitations<br />

(and possibilities) for women <strong>art</strong>ists in our time.<br />

Lisa Yuskavage. Day (1994)<br />

Intersecting Interpretations<br />

Reading <strong>art</strong> critics concerned with Yuskavage’s reminds me that I live<br />

in a very conservative period when even the discourse <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> world is<br />

<strong>of</strong>ten limited by conventional approaches to women, sex, and the body.<br />

One critic has written, for example, that such pictures embarrass him when<br />

he meets them in the gallery (Saltz, 2006).<br />

I am even told by the Public Art Fund website that Yuskavage makes<br />

“extreme depictions <strong>of</strong> women”(Public Art Fund, 2007). But Yuskavage’s<br />

nudes are not really very radical at all for a place like New York. Images<br />

<strong>of</strong> nude or nearly nude women (usually made by men), surround me in <strong>art</strong> galleries, in<br />

magazine advertisements, in internet searches for everything from “flowers” to “tools,”<br />

pin-ups, and especially when I am in Europe, in street advertisements. However conservative<br />

the times may be we do live in a context which one leading theorist has described<br />

as “ambient pornography” (Baudrillard, 2005:25). This too is one <strong>of</strong> the ironies <strong>of</strong> our<br />

times.<br />

When we examine her technique and process Yuskavage emerges as a rather conservative<br />

painter. Like Odd Nerdrum she can be read as a very traditional as opposed to<br />

“<strong>contemporary</strong>” <strong>art</strong>ist. She has told interviewers that she remained sheltered very much<br />

from <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> during her younger days and that she is infatuated with the European<br />

nude (Lovelace, 2001). In technical terms what I think we have in Yuskavage is<br />

a woman <strong>art</strong>ist who refuses to leave the European oil painting tradition and its female<br />

nude behind just as she avoids escapism. When we take a second look at her work we<br />

find a very challenging <strong>art</strong>ist who gives us much to think about concerning the women<br />

she paints. In these conservative times perhaps many people are reluctant to do this.<br />

It has been a hallmark <strong>of</strong> previous conservative times that images <strong>of</strong> naked bodies are<br />

sequestered away from public view for private consumption. It is to this second level <strong>of</strong><br />

escapism where Yuskavage’s <strong>art</strong> does its violence and the critics who are embarrassed<br />

to be in its presence in public make us aware <strong>of</strong> this, despite themselves.<br />

One <strong>of</strong> Yuskavage’s detractors for a number <strong>of</strong> years has been New York Sun <strong>art</strong><br />

critic David Cohen. Cohen says that Yuskavage fuses “the aesthetics <strong>of</strong> Hallmark cards<br />

and the knowing rhetoric <strong>of</strong> the graduate school seminar” (2003). Cohen cannot seem to<br />

get past the fact that Yuskavage is painting “breasts and buttocks” which for him remain<br />

“slick and silly” but to his credit, in my view, he does see something <strong>of</strong> Francis Bacon<br />

in her work. After suggesting who she may have slept with (do we still do that in <strong>art</strong><br />

criticism concerning women or men?), Cohen then castigates Yuskavage’s technique<br />

which he says is “derived from mid-twentieth century ‘How To’ manuals” and is “full <strong>of</strong><br />

hackneyed short cuts and splashy effects” (2003). Cohen also worries about the number<br />

<strong>of</strong> “fat women” in her paintings [some <strong>of</strong> Yuskavage’s women are pregnant] but he does<br />

think that she is coming to tone down her “misogyny”. What would women do without<br />

such men as Cohen to protect them? As for the Hallmark quip I really doubt Yuskavage<br />

will be asked to design a Christmas set for them any time soon!<br />

Also among the early responses to her works was the thought that one might hang<br />

in the mansion <strong>of</strong> Playboy empire founder Hugh Hefner, due in large p<strong>art</strong> to the position<br />

<strong>of</strong> the figures, lighting and color tonalities. Others have noted that her paintings remind<br />

24 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Yuskavage. True Blonde, Draped (1999)<br />

them <strong>of</strong> s<strong>of</strong>t pornography but in way that nudes by Ingres do not. But when we look<br />

closer at images such as Day and True Blonde, Draped, we see that these are not the<br />

airbrushed and digitally collaged women <strong>of</strong> Playboy, other s<strong>of</strong>t pornography magazines,<br />

or the advertising industry. Yuskavage’s women look far more like actual women—imperfect<br />

breasts, hips and thighs that are neither exactly the same nor perfectly smooth.<br />

Far from the hyper-idealized Playboy nude, the woman in Day is not revealing herself as<br />

in some pin-up pose; she is doing one <strong>of</strong> the things our culture teaches women to do—to<br />

examine themselves for imperfections. Yuskavage has supplied this image with several<br />

imperfections as we see when we look at it longer. It isn’t long before those thoughts <strong>of</strong><br />

s<strong>of</strong>t porn or a pin-up dissipate.<br />

In various interviews and statements concerning her work Yuskavage has acknowledged<br />

Bernini and other masters <strong>of</strong> painting the figure as her inspirations. Responding to<br />

an interviewer who asked her about Bernini’s influence Yuskavage replied: “I am really<br />

interested in the way things are weighted at the bottom. Bernini puts a helmet and rocks at<br />

the base to keep the work balanced. The difference is that, in a painting, you can take the<br />

weight out <strong>of</strong> the bottom and put it at the top. The ‘weight’ <strong>of</strong> color is another way <strong>of</strong> talking<br />

about color value, so when you use close value, as I do in these paintings, you reduce<br />

the weight <strong>of</strong> color.” Yuskavage blends classical ideas with <strong>contemporary</strong> representations<br />

as well. In four <strong>of</strong> her earlier works she modeled them after s<strong>of</strong>t porn images found in<br />

Penthouse magazine (the principle competitor <strong>of</strong> Playboy) (see Enright, 2007).<br />

We also notice that the sitter in True Blonde, Draped, while positioned in a boudoir<br />

pose typical <strong>of</strong> the magazines, certainly isn’t forcing a happy smile for the viewer.<br />

Yuskavage says she does not paint beauty but “the failure <strong>of</strong> beauty” (in Enright, 2007).<br />

It is quite possible that this painting represents a victim <strong>of</strong> a recent sexual attack (or at<br />

least someone living in a coercive sexualized arrangement). Her expression is one that<br />

makes us think long and hard about just what it is that she is thinking. I suppose there<br />

are some people who could be turned on by just about anything but I do not think it is<br />

imprudent to say that this painting does not work like pornography is supposed to work.<br />

I think a number <strong>of</strong> Yuskavage’s more vehement critics are simply quite uncomfortable<br />

with the female nude. Yuskavage engages with this problem well and her work really<br />

doesn’t seem to be about sex. The more we linger among her works the less “sexy” they<br />

become.<br />

Indeed, in the case <strong>of</strong> True Blonde, Draped, the shadow falling over the right side<br />

<strong>of</strong> her face serves as an abstract element performing the role that abstract swirls <strong>of</strong> color<br />

played in the painting <strong>of</strong> Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, Yuskavage uses this unclear element<br />

to posit that we can never fully know the mind <strong>of</strong> a sitter or any other<br />

person fully. Bacon said this was the case even when the work is a self<br />

portrait (Coulter, 2007). In an earlier painting, Big Blonde (1997), Yuskavage<br />

paints a very Bacon-like abstract swirl (<strong>of</strong> hair) sweeping down across<br />

the woman’s face. This makes the woman more enigmatic and highlights<br />

an underlying menacing quality to the world inhabited by the women in<br />

Yuskavage’s <strong>art</strong>. Many <strong>of</strong> her women look as exhausted as any Degas ballerina<br />

or the fatigued women who occupy Lautrec’s paintings (see also<br />

Lovelace, 2001). The color tonalities (the Romantic and Rococo sunsets <strong>of</strong><br />

Etty and Fragonard come to mind), contribute to the sense <strong>of</strong> strangeness<br />

and mystery in her work. If you find the women in her paintings disturbing<br />

—as even some well established critics have—perhaps it is important to ask<br />

the same questions about the culture from which the painter, and presumably<br />

her subjects, come from. Color is the vehicle <strong>of</strong> an invitation to stop<br />

and look closely and deeply. There are many things to find disturbing about<br />

our society today from any woman’s point <strong>of</strong> view (and there is nothing for<br />

shock value in a Yuskavage show that will not pale in comparison to the<br />

pages <strong>of</strong> many magazines at the local grocery store).<br />

So let us do that—let’s look again at True Blonde, Draped—look<br />

again at that face and body—is she 17 or 57? Is this an image <strong>of</strong> a woman<br />

25 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Yuskavage. True Blonde (1999).<br />

Yuskavage. Imprint (2006)<br />

at different ages shown to us simultaneously? Perhaps this is why Yuskavage has begun<br />

painting two figures in some <strong>of</strong> her recent works such as Imprint (2006). As Yuskavage<br />

suggested to an interviewer: “I would put out the possibility that there are not two figures.<br />

That there is one figure, one entity. It’s the idea <strong>of</strong> caring for oneself or struggling<br />

with oneself” (Scott, 2006). Imprint is my favorite Yuskavage painting—so poetic in its<br />

representation <strong>of</strong> the two ages <strong>of</strong> a woman—the forty-something clinging to her youth<br />

which looks ambivalently on the older woman she is to become.<br />

The woman in True Blonde may appear, at first glance to be masturbating, but on<br />

second glance, she also appears rather introspective and her almost stereotypical (but as<br />

always in a Yuskavage), imperfect body is more like that <strong>of</strong> Day. Perhaps she is a magazine<br />

model—but one saddened by her occupation pondering other possibilities. Further,<br />

in most pornographic imagery she would appear in stockings and the black shadow line<br />

falling over her left thigh may indeed be Yuskavage’s way <strong>of</strong> entreating us to think about<br />

that. This might be a woman protecting her sexuality from the viewer, keeping one <strong>of</strong> her<br />

powers and her pleasures to herself. If this were an image in a pornographic magazine<br />

then it is quite likely that the woman’s sexual organs would be exposed and a much more<br />

explicit image <strong>of</strong> masturbation would be shown. In those images the woman typically<br />

looks into the camera with her air brushed misty eyes.<br />

There is also the title “True Blonde” which plays upon the old witticism that the<br />

only way to know the true colour <strong>of</strong> a woman’s hair is to see her pubic area. In this case,<br />

we are prevented from seeing this area by the sitter herself. For all we know this may be<br />

an image <strong>of</strong> a woman coming to contemplate her own powers, desires, fantasies. Maybe<br />

Yuskavage’s <strong>art</strong> is about the women—not the viewer!<br />

It seems that whatever her motivations and intentions, Lisa Yuskavage has managed<br />

to be understood as a sexist and a feminist at the same time, although the painter<br />

does not seem to identify her <strong>art</strong> with feminism: “There’s nothing more real than politics,<br />

and my work is not about what’s real,” she says (Scott, 2006). Eschewing politics for<br />

fiction, her work is likely to <strong>of</strong>fend the orthodox feminist as it is the stereotypical “old<br />

white male conservative.” This, to my mind, is among the best things about Yuskavage’s<br />

work. Like many <strong>art</strong>ists (be they writers, painters, photographers etc.), Yuskavage does<br />

not seek an empirical or a political resolution to the world in her <strong>art</strong>—but rather—a<br />

poetic one. Inviting multiple and complex readings, Yuskavage cultivates, intentionally<br />

or otherwise, uncertainty. The kind <strong>of</strong> pleasant uncertainty that stimulates debate and<br />

engagement with <strong>art</strong>. As Jean Baudrillard would understand the world is given to us as<br />

enigmatic and unintelligible—why cannot the task <strong>of</strong> thought (including poetry, fiction,<br />

painting) be to make the world even more enigmatic, more unintelligible? (2000:83; see<br />

also 1996:105; and 2001:<strong>15</strong>5)<br />

Conclusion<br />

Perhaps in our Patriot Act, post-September 11, 2001 world, the critics<br />

(especially those located in New York), prefer their <strong>art</strong> on the lighter side. I<br />

have a feeling that if a pre-Raphaelite were to emerge in New York s/he would<br />

be highly celebrated at this time. Painters react to the times in which they live.<br />

Yuskavage has her way, the escapists have theirs. Robert Rauschenberg worried<br />

that every new thing he learned about <strong>art</strong> placed a certain limit on him. This is<br />

true <strong>of</strong> everything we learn no matter how useful or valuable it may be. Much<br />

<strong>of</strong> the negative critical response to Lisa Yuskavage’s <strong>art</strong> reminds me <strong>of</strong> another<br />

woman <strong>art</strong>ist—Jenny Holtzer and one <strong>of</strong> her “Truisms”: “you are a victim <strong>of</strong><br />

the rules you live by.”<br />

One critic recently said (not supportively) that Yuskavage was a good example<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Andy Warhol quip: “Art is what you can get away with” (Naves,<br />

2003). The same may also be said about <strong>art</strong> criticism. In any event Yuskavage<br />

does not seem to be paying much attention to the critics and in her interview with<br />

Enright she also cited Warhol when asked how she felt about the critics. She said<br />

she hoped they spelled her name correctly and otherwise does not worry about<br />

what the critics are saying—simply measure it in press column inches (Enright,<br />

2007).<br />

26 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Endnotes<br />

1. The work, which sold for $1,024,000<br />

at Sotheby’s (New York) on May 10,<br />

2006 is known as Honeymoon (1988).<br />

A list <strong>of</strong> Yuskavage’s solo and group<br />

shows as well as awards she has received<br />

may be viewed in her CV as posted by<br />

The David Zwirner Gallery: http://www.<br />

davidzwirner.com/resources/377<strong>15</strong>/<br />

LY%20Bio%202007.pdf<br />

2. All the four images included in this<br />

essay are available on many websites<br />

as a result <strong>of</strong> a search on “Google<br />

Images” including the website <strong>of</strong><br />

Lisa Yuskavage’s dealer, David<br />

Zwirner. http://www.davidzwirner.com/<br />

What an interesting thing it is to see the female nude in <strong>art</strong> history so deeply problematized<br />

by critics at the time when a highly skilled woman has emerged to paint them.<br />

Women have been far more likely to use performance, installation <strong>art</strong>, and photography<br />

to achieve what Yuskavage does in the historically contentious medium <strong>of</strong> oil paint. One<br />

thinks <strong>of</strong> Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith and Tina Barney who were also roundly dismissed<br />

in their early days (see Lovelace, 2001). Few women painters have worked with<br />

the nude as Yuskavage has done (Tamara Lempicka, Frida Kahlo, Dorothy Tanning, and<br />

Silvia Sleigh). There are also very few women painters who have broached this area <strong>of</strong><br />

traditional male desire in a way that allows them the power to reflect on the female nude<br />

from either her point <strong>of</strong> view or that <strong>of</strong> the women in the paintings. Her works compel me<br />

to ask: “what if the painter is actually asking me to think about what it means to look at<br />

women’s bodies as a public viewer in a public space—rather than alone with a magazine<br />

or a computer screen at home?” Yuskavage suggested in a recent interview with Robert<br />

Enright that this is at least p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> what she is doing with her work: “consider that what<br />

we’re looking at is the exact opposite <strong>of</strong> what we think we’re seeing. We are looking in<br />

on something that is purely intimate, rather than at something occasioned by the presence<br />

<strong>of</strong> the viewer?” (in Enright, 2007). <strong>Issue</strong>s <strong>of</strong> sexuality, reception and power are difficult<br />

to skirt when looking at Yuskavage’s works, and perhaps that is another reason why her<br />

work is so unsettling to some.<br />

References<br />

Jean Baudrillard (1996). The Perfect Crime. New York: Verso.<br />

Jean Baudrillard (2000). The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press.<br />

Jean Baudrillard (2001). Impossible Exchange. London: SAGE.<br />

Jean Baudrillard (2005). The Conspiracy <strong>of</strong> Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. Edited by<br />

Sylvere Lotringer. NewYork: Semiotext(e)/ MIT Press.<br />

David Cohen (2003). “Gallery Going: Lisa Yuskavage” New York Sun (June 19): http://www.<br />

<strong>art</strong>critical.com/DavidCohen/SUN6.htm<br />

Gerry Coulter (2007). “Overcoming the Epistemological Break: Francis Bacon and Jean<br />

Baudrillard and the Intersections <strong>of</strong> Art and Theory” Euro Art Magazine, Number 5, (Winter):<br />

http://www.euro<strong>art</strong>magazine.com/new/?issue=6&page=1&content=140<br />

Gerry Coulter (2007a). “One Among Several – The Traditional Gaze Seduced. In Kritikos:<br />

A Journal <strong>of</strong> Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text, and Image (July, 2007): http://intertheory.<br />

org/coulter2.htm<br />

Robert Enright (2007). “The Overwhelmer: An Interview with Lisa Yuskavage.” Border Crossings<br />

Magazine (May): http://bordercrossingsmag.com/issue103/<strong>art</strong>icle/<strong>15</strong><br />

Carey Lovelace (2001). “Lisa Yuskavage: Fleshed Out.” In Art in America (July): http://www.<br />

find<strong>art</strong>icles.com/p/<strong>art</strong>icles/mi_m1248/is_7_89/ai_76332997<br />

Mario Naves (2003). “Hurry Up, Please, It’s Time: Banishing Fame’s 16th Minute”. The New<br />

York Observer, (June 8): http://www.observer.com/node/47648<br />

Public Art Fund (2007). “Public Art Fund Talks: Current Schedule: Lisa Yuskavage” (May 3):<br />

http://www.public<strong>art</strong>fund.org/pafweb/talks/talks-s07.htm<br />

Jerry Saltz (2006). “Female Trouble” Lisa Yuskavage – New Work” Village Voice, (November<br />

20): http://www.<strong>art</strong>net.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz11-20-06.asp<br />

Andrea K. Scott (2006). “Lisa Yuskavage: Flesh for Fantasy.” An interview in Time Out New<br />

York, Number 577 (October 19-25, 2006). This is also on web: http://www.timeout.com/<br />

newyork/<strong>art</strong>icles/<strong>art</strong>/3954/flesh-for-fantasy<br />

27 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


kubilay akman<br />

Flashing Emin: Critical Analysis <strong>of</strong><br />

“Spectacular” Contemporary Arts<br />

First Words<br />

The conceptual gravity <strong>of</strong> “conceptual <strong>art</strong>s” is becoming much weaker every<br />

day as the <strong>art</strong>ists involved in <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> movements are increasingly trapped by<br />

narcissistic tendencies and an extremely pronounced intrigue with domestic objects.<br />

Some examples are turning into a “big joke” without causing a big laugh. Where is <strong>art</strong><br />

going? Or, perhaps a better question, where has <strong>art</strong> been? The answer is still ambiguous<br />

and many <strong>of</strong> the attempts to answer this question most probably would be swept aside<br />

by the actual happenings in the <strong>art</strong> world. In this <strong>art</strong>icle, my intention is quite far away<br />

from providing “substantial answers” to the issues and problems <strong>of</strong> the <strong>contemporary</strong><br />

<strong>art</strong> world; however, this text is intended to contribute to the current theoretical and conceptual<br />

problems <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> in the 2000s through some modest questions, with a p<strong>art</strong>icular<br />

focus on the <strong>art</strong> works <strong>of</strong> Tracey Emin. This was not a random gesture to emphasize “<strong>art</strong><br />

works” with italics. Whether to call her and other <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists’ works “<strong>art</strong>” or<br />

not has been a crucial separation for the last decade. On the one hand, there is a chorus<br />

<strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> critics, writers, publishers, editors, curators, collectors, etc. chanting and greeting<br />

these works as outstanding masterpieces, without any critical process. On the other<br />

hand we find the most conventional and conservative critics blaming these <strong>contemporary</strong><br />

tendencies with a preference for previous <strong>art</strong> styles and schools, and denying their being<br />

<strong>art</strong> in fact. I personally prefer to say: “Nice to meet you Achilles. I have no suspicion<br />

that you are Achilles. However, I am as sure as your name that you have that vulnerable<br />

heel. Although it is quite difficult to catch you there, still I will try to direct my arrows<br />

right there!” Yes, this is <strong>art</strong>. At least for the beginning we should accept that the works <strong>of</strong><br />

Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and the others; are <strong>art</strong>. Actually works <strong>of</strong> all the significant<br />

conceptual <strong>art</strong>ists aroused after the “aesthetical breaking point” <strong>of</strong> Marcel Duchamp<br />

could be considered as <strong>art</strong>. Here I will not get into a discussion around “What is <strong>art</strong>?”.<br />

However I can clarify a little further my theoretical position in this issue:<br />

1. Being or not being <strong>art</strong> cannot be determined by any collector, <strong>art</strong> dealer or by<br />

any <strong>art</strong> critic or scholar.<br />

2. Art as a social process and a social production from the caves to the galleries <strong>of</strong><br />

modern cities.<br />

3. The current <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> is <strong>art</strong> in spite <strong>of</strong> all the reactionary critiques. Not<br />

because it is called <strong>art</strong> by spellbound followers, but it is <strong>art</strong> if only on account <strong>of</strong> the<br />

social, cultural and <strong>art</strong>istic structures that produce, reproduce and make it as <strong>art</strong> in a<br />

dynamic process.<br />

What is the point in her scandalous <strong>art</strong> works? Essentially, her point, like many<br />

other <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists, is based on her “flashing” objects <strong>of</strong> her personal life and<br />

happenings. This kind <strong>of</strong> “exhibitionism” aesthetically created and performed, is still a<br />

premium seductive factor for the <strong>art</strong> audience. Especially when there are the fading shades<br />

<strong>of</strong> “innocence,” in the <strong>art</strong>istic expression, creation and production <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> pieces, in spite<br />

<strong>of</strong> the dense coquettish style <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong>ist, the enthusiasm <strong>of</strong> the audience is growing. As<br />

Jean Baudrillard said, “There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.” Tracey Emin makes this<br />

balance perfectly, and through her all exhibitionism in the <strong>art</strong>istic activities, she keeps<br />

a semblance <strong>of</strong> internal innocence intact somewhere, and this is always catching the attention<br />

<strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> crowd. Hence, I would claim that the “innocent” stratagem is the real<br />

factor <strong>of</strong> attention, rather than all the flashing ceremonies.<br />

28 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


In her career, she produced two symptomatic <strong>art</strong> works and she owes much <strong>of</strong> her<br />

success to these pieces. One is Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), or The<br />

Tent. It was owned by Charles Saatchi and burned in the Mom<strong>art</strong> warehouse fire (2004).<br />

In this work Emin put the names <strong>of</strong> everybody she had slept with. She says, “Some I’d<br />

had shag with in bed or against a wall some I had just slept with, like my grandma. I used<br />

to lie in her bed and hold her hand. We used to listen to the radio together and nod <strong>of</strong>f to<br />

sleep. You don’t do that with someone you don’t love and don’t care about.” 2 Here, you<br />

can see the addition <strong>of</strong> “innocence” too, if you can catch and “be caught.” This is the<br />

trick <strong>of</strong> Emin: always putting a little innocent sauce over the soup <strong>of</strong> lustfulness. This<br />

contrast is at the very core where “seduction” is bred.<br />

The other symptomatic work is, My Bed, which was exhibited in Tate Gallery<br />

(1999). In this work, she turned her used and dirty bed into an installation, with used<br />

towels, cigarette packs, vodka bottles, condoms, panties with menstrual stains, slippers<br />

and other objects from everyday life. Although the previous work was more scandalous,<br />

this is much more striking with its high level <strong>of</strong> exhibitionism and emotional exploitation.<br />

Simon Wilson, the curator from the Tate said: “It came about after an episode when she<br />

was very ill and depressed. She spent a week in bed in a suicidal state, according to her.<br />

It is a meditation on spending a lot <strong>of</strong> time in bed. The bed is confrontational. There is an<br />

underlying innocence and honesty in her work and you are reminded <strong>of</strong> very fundamental<br />

issues.” 3 Here, our thesis about “innocence” is <strong>of</strong>ficially accepted. We can just emphasize<br />

the <strong>art</strong>ificiality <strong>of</strong> this innocence, which is pr<strong>of</strong>essionally produced and being marketed.<br />

as or instance, the crises <strong>of</strong> a middle-aged woman, the theme <strong>of</strong> suicide, <strong>of</strong> being left like<br />

used condoms, etc. For me it appears a little soapy and not <strong>art</strong>istically well-organized,<br />

although the giants <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> world would not agree with us.<br />

Contemporary Artists, or to be more exact, the most famous ones who have been<br />

involved in <strong>art</strong> capitalism more than the others, are a p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the “spectacle.” According<br />

Guy Debord, “the spectacle originates in the loss <strong>of</strong> the unity <strong>of</strong> the world, and the gigantic<br />

expansion <strong>of</strong> the modern spectacle expresses the totality <strong>of</strong> this loss” 4 This is like a new<br />

form <strong>of</strong> alienation and the spectacle is trapping human beings. In the spectacle, “what<br />

was represented as genuine life reveals itself simply as more genuinely spectacular 5 life.”<br />

So, the effects exhibited in the work <strong>of</strong> Tracey Emin are just elements <strong>of</strong> a “spectacular<br />

life.” This spectacular existence <strong>of</strong> her <strong>art</strong> is harming the innocence and revealing the<br />

tricks <strong>of</strong> the seduction. Fortunately or unfortunately, we (the audience) are not the biggest<br />

victims <strong>of</strong> the spectacle in the <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> scene. The real victims are always<br />

the <strong>art</strong>ists themselves: They are reaching popularity, fame, and fortune. So, you can ask<br />

how are they “victims”? If we look deeper, we see what was lost is very important and<br />

is compromised with all these things: in the wheels <strong>of</strong> spectacle, they are losing the possibility<br />

to express their potential more substantially and to be “free <strong>art</strong>ists” whose <strong>art</strong><br />

works are more lasting than TV advertisements or any other temporary thing in popular<br />

culture. If the risk <strong>of</strong> this loss is acceptable for them, this critique has no ontological<br />

basis for their understanding.<br />

For centuries, we have observed the indirect and sophisticated marks <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists’<br />

individual lives. However, <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists are rather impatient and directly put<br />

their lives into <strong>art</strong> form. The people you slept with, the condoms your p<strong>art</strong>ners used,<br />

the panties dirtied with your menstrual stains. Why should the audience be interested in<br />

theset? However, the audience is interested in these. This is another matter. I would like<br />

to focus on the narcissistic dimensions <strong>of</strong> this process. Emin confesses her narcissism<br />

in the words written on the tent, “With myself, always myself, never forgetting.” This is<br />

like a hymn <strong>of</strong> narcissism in my opinion, rather than the words <strong>of</strong> loneliness.<br />

Narcissus fell in love with himself and used to watch the reflection <strong>of</strong> his beauty in<br />

the water. In the <strong>contemporary</strong>/<strong>art</strong>istic version <strong>of</strong> narcissism the <strong>art</strong>ist, broken up admiring<br />

and hating herself, is broadening her complicated feeling over the “self,” toward us.<br />

This is like dissolving in the water, rather than a simple reflection over it. In the classical/typical<br />

version <strong>of</strong> narcissistic order, the subject <strong>of</strong> admiration was located in the face<br />

29 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


<strong>of</strong> the person. In the modern version, everything the person or her personality touches is<br />

provided as “admiration subjects.” The subjects cover everything she touches, as if she<br />

consecrates whatever is around her. This is like a new personality, a kind <strong>of</strong> “hyper-personality.”<br />

The new narcissistic person is not satisfied by her own admiration and desiring<br />

to be admired by the millions. You see this same mechanism with all pop-stars. In this<br />

worship <strong>of</strong> narcissism the sacrifice is “<strong>art</strong>” on the altar <strong>of</strong> spectacle.<br />

Vulnerable Points<br />

There are several vulnerable points in Tracey Emin’s work. Maybe one <strong>of</strong> the most<br />

stigmatic one is that, in spite <strong>of</strong> all the everyday image, carelessness, randomness or<br />

openness, her works are treated in the same way, as more conventional <strong>art</strong> pieces. We<br />

have seen that two times: first, in the fire <strong>of</strong> warehouse; second, in the intervention <strong>of</strong><br />

two Chinese <strong>art</strong>ists. However there is a virtue, <strong>of</strong> which we find plenty <strong>of</strong> samples in<br />

other <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists, although missing a little with Emin: temporary character <strong>of</strong><br />

the work. Many <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists are creating their works that destroy themselves or<br />

turn into something else with the p<strong>art</strong>icipation <strong>of</strong> other people. However, if it were not<br />

burned in the fire, The Tent would remain the same forever. Maybe an <strong>art</strong>istic instinct<br />

prevented her to do it second time and in this way it has become more meaningful. When<br />

we look at to the case <strong>of</strong> Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, behind a humorous curtain we can<br />

realize a more sophisticated and political theme, which is like a divine punishment to<br />

the intentionally apolitical character <strong>of</strong> Emin’s <strong>art</strong>. After their “p<strong>art</strong>icipation” the work<br />

(My Bed) was restored immediately, then nobody could say that: “this is a living <strong>art</strong> work<br />

and we consider this contribution as a new level <strong>of</strong> the concept.” Let us remember the<br />

motto: “With myself, always myself, never forgetting.” Apparently, a person who says<br />

this would not agree to collaborate with the others.<br />

What was the “contribution” or “intervention” <strong>of</strong> the Chinese <strong>art</strong>ists to Tracey<br />

Emin’s Bed? Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi jumped over the My Bed in the Tate Gallery, in<br />

25 October 1999, this is the essence <strong>of</strong> their action, or with their own expression the <strong>art</strong><br />

performance titled Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey’s Bed. The visitors were shocked<br />

during this action, and some <strong>of</strong> them even supposed that this is an <strong>of</strong>ficial p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the<br />

event. The Chinese men intended to have some “critical sex” over the bed <strong>of</strong> Tracey Emin<br />

to complete the work, but they could not complete their performance entirely. Yuan Chai<br />

stated that Emin’s work was a strong one, although handicapped by being “institutionalized.”<br />

He said: “We want to push the idea further. Our action will make the public think<br />

about what is good <strong>art</strong> or bad <strong>art</strong>. We didn’t have time to do a proper performance. I<br />

thought I should touch the bed and smell the bed.” There were some words on his body<br />

such as “Communism,” “Freedom,” “Idealism,” and “Internationalism” written in Chinese<br />

and English. J. J. Xi said that Emin’s work was not interesting enough and they wanted<br />

to explore further, making it more significant and sensational. The words on his body<br />

were “Optimism,” “Idealism” and “Anarchism.” The gallery covered up this action and<br />

neither the gallery nor the <strong>art</strong>ist made another attempt to charge the Chinese <strong>art</strong>ists.<br />

So, there were two more names in Everyone T. Emin Slept With. Yuan Chai and<br />

Jian Jun Xi, not at the same time, but at the same bed, took their place with a serious<br />

intention to practice on/with her bed. So, why not include their names as well in a possible<br />

reincarnation <strong>of</strong> The Tent? Neither the gallery nor the <strong>art</strong>ist was willing to accept<br />

this p<strong>art</strong>icipation. The reason was intuitively expressed by Yuan Chai: institutionalization.<br />

The institutionalization process, despite the opposite image, has continued as a<br />

vulnerable point. In fact, it would be fairer to change the title <strong>of</strong> the work to Our Bed, as<br />

it belonged to the Chinese <strong>art</strong>ists as well. However, the more the narcissistic character<br />

spread through, the stronger she would react to any other dissolution in the water <strong>of</strong> her<br />

self-centered <strong>art</strong>istic production. Hence, the gallery just restored the installation, ignoring<br />

the new contribution.<br />

30 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Alexander Brener would call the action/performance <strong>of</strong> the Chinese <strong>art</strong>ists probably<br />

as a kind <strong>of</strong> “anti-technological resistance.” According to Brener, anti-technologies are<br />

“striving for decomposition and unproductivity. Decomposition is an attempt to hinder<br />

the repressive order, which in hegemonic culture is perceived as the main source <strong>of</strong><br />

productivity. The normative product in today’s understanding is repressive consensus<br />

in a certain packaging. Exactly this consensus must be subjected to the procedure <strong>of</strong><br />

decomposition. Decomposition and disintegration are the weapons <strong>of</strong> a minority, calling<br />

into question the consensus <strong>of</strong> a moral majority.” 7 Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi used these<br />

“weapons” as a p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> this minority against the repressive “consensus.” The “decomposition”<br />

disintegrated the “certain packaging” <strong>of</strong> the spectacular <strong>art</strong> for a while, although<br />

their voice just faded in the fog <strong>of</strong> amnesia.<br />

Notes:<br />

1. “Emin Defends Her Art,” BBC Online,<br />

BBC News (August 13, 2001).<br />

2. Barry Didcock, “The E spot,” The<br />

Sunday Herald, 30 April 2006<br />

3. Nigel Reynolds, “Tate warns that<br />

soiled bed exhibit may <strong>of</strong>fend,”<br />

Telegraph, 20 October 1999<br />

4. Guy Debord, Society <strong>of</strong> Spectacle,<br />

http://library.nothingness.org/<strong>art</strong>icles/SI/<br />

en/display/16<br />

5. Ibid, http://library.nothingness.org/<strong>art</strong>icles/SI/en/display/23<br />

6. Sam Wallace, “Tate protesters wreck<br />

<strong>art</strong>ist’s unmade bed,” Telegraph, 25<br />

October 1999.<br />

7. Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz,<br />

“Anti Technologies <strong>of</strong> Resistance”,<br />

EuroArt Web Magazine, issue: 1, Winter<br />

2006<br />

8. Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual<br />

Art,” ArtForum, June 1967.<br />

9. The full quote from Johann Wolfgang<br />

von Goethe is like this: “Theory is gray,<br />

but the golden tree <strong>of</strong> life is green.”<br />

Last Words<br />

Unfortunately, Tracey Emin’s sensational style, both in her life and <strong>art</strong> works, is<br />

overshadowing the more interesting representatives <strong>of</strong> <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> scene and more<br />

p<strong>art</strong>icularly YBAs, such as Damien Hirst. As Sol Lewitt said, “the idea becomes a machine<br />

that makes the <strong>art</strong>. This kind <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> is not theoretical or illustrative <strong>of</strong> theories; it is<br />

intuitive, it is involved with all types <strong>of</strong> mental processes and it is purposeless.” 8 When<br />

we look at numerous established or young <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists, we see how the machine<br />

(idea) successfully works in the intuitive creation/production process. During my stay<br />

in the Balkans, as an <strong>art</strong> critic and scholar I had the chance to see the outstanding works<br />

<strong>of</strong> many <strong>art</strong>ists, who are working devotedly despite all the difficulties. I can mention the<br />

names <strong>of</strong> Alem Korkut, Tanja Perisic, Saso Stanojkovic, Slavica Janeslieva among many<br />

others. Apparently Damien Hirst is more “conceptual” and “creative” than Tracey Emin<br />

with his elaborately thought and applied installations. I can mention also the names <strong>of</strong><br />

Debora Warner and Ana Prvacki, both are promising female promising <strong>art</strong>ists who prove<br />

that <strong>art</strong> can be successful and aesthetically/conceptually significant without flashing the<br />

<strong>art</strong>ist himself/herself. And <strong>of</strong> course Marina Abramovic is the “master” <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>s that touch<br />

the most intimate and individual points, while at the same time dealing with the most<br />

public and political issues, through a powerful <strong>art</strong>istic grammar, even exposing her body<br />

in the highest open and direct way, still thousands miles far away from exhibitionism.<br />

Tracey Emin is unfortunately lacking <strong>of</strong> these features.<br />

Here the borders <strong>of</strong> our critical analysis have been limited with just two installations,<br />

as these were the most typical and stigmatic ones. Flashing the “personal” is an<br />

obsession for Emin constantly repeated through her works. This shallow exhibitionism<br />

is missing a strong conceptual or <strong>art</strong>istic basis, and prodding the audience through the<br />

“flashes,”—spectacle, innocence games and lascivious tricks <strong>of</strong> seduction. Art does not<br />

need to be “theoretical,” as Lewitt said. However an “idea” is processed as the essential<br />

mechanism at the he<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> conceptual <strong>art</strong>s. For Emin, “desire” is filling the absence <strong>of</strong><br />

an elaborate idea. It is possible to talk about the “desiring machines” in the Deleuzian<br />

meaning <strong>of</strong> the term, crossing her work.<br />

If we close the circle where we st<strong>art</strong>ed, when we speak sociologically, Emin is an<br />

<strong>art</strong>ist and her work is <strong>art</strong>; although she has the Achilles’ Heel. The critique here targeted<br />

her “heel.” However the qualities that I refer to as “Achilles’ Heel” can be quite acceptable<br />

for others. We can have an endless theoretical discussion on this issue. As Goethe<br />

said, “theory is gray.” 9 The point is that the green tree <strong>of</strong> life is also becoming gray<br />

more and more everyday. And finally, when <strong>art</strong> is also beginning to lose its colors and<br />

becoming gray, then the bells <strong>of</strong> caution are ringing. There are dark gray clouds floating<br />

over <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>s.<br />

31 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Please click on this link to download the complete document The Artist’s Reseved<br />

Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement: www.ctrlp-<strong>art</strong><strong>journal</strong>.org/pdfs/siegelaub.pdf<br />

32 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


patrick d. flores<br />

The Philippine Modern:<br />

Conceiving a Collective Category<br />

It was in 1981 when the <strong>art</strong>ist Raymundo Albano, director <strong>of</strong> museums and non-theater<br />

operations at the Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines (CCP), looked back at the ten years<br />

<strong>of</strong> what he called developmental <strong>art</strong>. There pervaded since 1971, the eve <strong>of</strong> the declaration<br />

<strong>of</strong> M<strong>art</strong>ial Law by Ferdinand Marcos, to the beginning <strong>of</strong> the decade <strong>of</strong> the regime’s<br />

decline, a “crisis in representation” and, Albano quoting the critic Armando Manalo, a<br />

“metaphysical unrest.” 1 This was largely shaped by the search for a sense <strong>of</strong> origin <strong>of</strong><br />

Philippine <strong>art</strong> that was reckoned to be lying beyond the pale <strong>of</strong> the “western tradition”:<br />

a daunting prospect for a quest considering that the very inquiry into this identity may<br />

just prove to be the immanent critique <strong>of</strong> colonialism itself and, therefore, could never<br />

be viewed as external or extraneous to the conception <strong>of</strong> whatever may be nominated<br />

as “Philippine.” Still, the anxiety festered, and in the frenzy <strong>of</strong> nation building in the<br />

sanguine season <strong>of</strong> the Cold War, this affliction could only be alluring, open to both<br />

pageantry and melodrama, overinvestment and underexplanation. After all, as high priest<br />

Arturo Luz would sternly disabuse: “There is yet no tradition in Filipino painting, only<br />

painters painting in a foreign manner or style or tradition.” 2 This desire for the Filipino<br />

is the fear <strong>of</strong> repeating the foreign, a fear that defers the perfection <strong>of</strong> the impossible,<br />

the “not-yet” possible, Filipino.<br />

Albano, perhaps in a strategically ludic mode, likened this form <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>istic practice<br />

to other forms <strong>of</strong> developmentalist exercise, as in developmental communication<br />

harnessed for population control programs, or simply any other “fast-action” initiatives<br />

that could not be delayed, as in the building <strong>of</strong> roads or security complements yielding<br />

results “based on a total community response.” 3 The CCP thought <strong>of</strong> the period from<br />

1971 to 1975 as the “exposure phase” in which “advanced <strong>art</strong>—experimental in nature<br />

—were deployed in the galleries. The use <strong>of</strong> sand, junk iron, non-<strong>art</strong> materials such as raw<br />

lumber, rocks...were common materials for the <strong>art</strong>ists’ development strategies. People<br />

were shocked, scared, delighted, pleased and satisfied even though their preconceived<br />

notions <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> did not agree with what they encountered.” 4 This “curatorial stance” was<br />

provocative: it may have insinuated a level <strong>of</strong> democratic habit within a possible Kantian<br />

sensus communis, an engagement with strangeness and an encounter with disbelief, into<br />

an institution that was complicit in repressing the body politic in no uncertain terms.<br />

In all this, Albano was convinced that the atmosphere at the CCP “made one relatively<br />

aware <strong>of</strong> an environment suddenly turning visible.” 5 The Center, hence, was conceiving<br />

a world and its spellbound subjects, inventing an indispensable mythology <strong>of</strong> freedom<br />

and prefiguring the unknown in a regime that had claimed unerring destiny: tadhana, a<br />

fate written in the stars.<br />

This exhibition excerpts Albano’s foundational statement because it intimates an<br />

ontogenesis, a process <strong>of</strong> becoming, rendered urgent, with the alacrity <strong>of</strong> development,<br />

in the flash <strong>of</strong> exposure. This “suddenly turning visible” captures the energy <strong>of</strong> that instance<br />

and willful instantiation—and it may be a paradox that it presages a project that<br />

is about objects, a collection that has become sediment, the remains <strong>of</strong> erstwhile heady<br />

times. Nevertheless, these objects are in place: as they are brought out into the light <strong>of</strong><br />

an exhibition marking a monolith’s birth forty years ago, they will be endowed with the<br />

coherence <strong>of</strong> a collection, regardless <strong>of</strong> how they have been convened incoherently over<br />

time. This enables the public to revisit this estate so to speak, and from it carve out a<br />

terrain on which to initiate speculations.<br />

33 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Victorio Edades. The Builders.<br />

Image courtesy <strong>of</strong> the Cultural Center<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Philippines.<br />

Collecting History<br />

There is no existing history <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> collection. This commemorative exhibition<br />

seeks to reconstruct how objects made their way into the institution as an initial survey<br />

<strong>of</strong> sightlines. We can point to specific sources:<br />

First the building itself, which opened in 1969, that housed donations from such<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists as Hernando R. Ocampo, who <strong>of</strong>fered his design for the work Genesis that was<br />

transformed into a wondrous tapestry by Japanese weavers to serve as the iconic curtain<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Main Theater; Arturo Luz (Black and White) and Cesar Legaspi (Triptych) likewise<br />

donated murals, which adorn the Little Theater Lobby, alongside Eduardo Castrillo’s<br />

metal totem Pyramid Growth. Other works, most probably commissions as well,<br />

that were built into the structure include Vicente Manansala’s brass relief Tribute to the<br />

Seven Arts for the Main Theater entrance and Roberto Chabet’s collage for the curtain<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Little Theater. A panel <strong>of</strong> Carlos Francisco’s Abuses <strong>of</strong> Spanish Authorities for the<br />

New York World’s Fair in 1964; Napoleon Abueva’s Ballet Dancer; and Arturo Luz’s<br />

gargantuan paper clip were later additions to the public <strong>art</strong> collection <strong>of</strong> the Center. 6 By<br />

presidential fiat in 1966, the site <strong>of</strong> the building was decreed, and thereafter the Board <strong>of</strong><br />

Trustees was named. The edifice, sitting on 21 hectares <strong>of</strong> reclaimed land from Manila<br />

Bay, is by itself p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> collection in a manner <strong>of</strong> speaking. Designed by Leandro<br />

Locsin, it speaks <strong>of</strong> the style that was hailed then as innovative and its engineering, a<br />

public works feat for a Third World country in Southeast Asia: cantilevered construction<br />

in raw concrete with the use <strong>of</strong> crushed shells on site as aggregate and landscaping by<br />

Ildefonso P. Santos.<br />

The commitment <strong>of</strong> the architect to the visual <strong>art</strong>s was earnest as indicated in the<br />

blueprint: a painting and sculpture hall with a section on <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong>; a colonial<br />

<strong>art</strong> pavilion, split into two levels in which the San Jose church baroque altar donated<br />

by Antonio Bantug was to be ensconced; the Arturo de Santos collection <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>, gold,<br />

and ceramics; the Potenciano Badillo collection <strong>of</strong> Muslim <strong>art</strong>; and a library for <strong>art</strong> and<br />

music. These pavilions would be surrounded by gardens, fountains, pools, and plazas so<br />

that visitors may be “surprised at every turn as new vistas unfold.” 7<br />

Second, the initial acquisitions, largely undertaken by Roberto Chabet, who was<br />

appointed Curator as early as 1967, two years before the Center formally opened to the<br />

public. He purchased for the Center important pieces like Victorio Edades’s The Builders<br />

and Napoleon Abueva’s Allegorical Harpoon. 8 It could be that some <strong>of</strong> these early pieces<br />

were p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> Summer Exhibition 1970,<br />

described as a “serendipitous collection<br />

<strong>of</strong> over 100 paintings, sculptures, prints,<br />

drawings, and ‘but-is-it-<strong>art</strong>?’ objects that<br />

virtually span six decades <strong>of</strong> Philippine<br />

<strong>art</strong> history.” 9 It is reported that works<br />

like The Builders, Fernando Amorsolo’s<br />

Burning <strong>of</strong> Manila, Ofelia Gelvezon’s<br />

pinball series, and Brenda Fajardo’s<br />

“classic-inspired etchings” were p<strong>art</strong><br />

<strong>of</strong> this ensemble; and indeed they are<br />

in the collection. To prepare Chabet for<br />

his duties, the CCP secured for him a generous grant from the John D. Rockefeller Fund<br />

so that he could observe museum procedures, administration, and related techniques in<br />

the United States, from 1967 to 1969. Chabet, who was trained as an architect at the<br />

University <strong>of</strong> Santo Tomas and was cited by Galo Ocampo 10 as Chabet Rodriguez in an<br />

essay on Philippine <strong>art</strong> history as early as 1963, had no background as a curator or as<br />

an <strong>art</strong> historian and came into the scene with his modest reputation as an <strong>art</strong>ist whom<br />

Arturo Luz deemed worthy to be exhibited in his eponymous gallery; he won First Prize<br />

at the Art Association <strong>of</strong> the Philippines annual competition in 1961. The registry <strong>of</strong> the<br />

collection lists Lee Aguinaldo’s Linear #24 (acrylic on wood) as one <strong>of</strong> the first to be<br />

bought before CCP’s inauguration; and Leonard Aguinaldo’s E-Maginings as one <strong>of</strong> the<br />

latest purchased in 2008.<br />

34 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Left: Roberto Chabet. Untitled. 1976.<br />

19 x 28 cm<br />

Middle: Roberto Chabet. Untitled. 1976.<br />

Printed matter on illustration board.<br />

19 x 28 cm.<br />

Right: Roberto Chabet. Untitled.<br />

Inkwash on paper. 1965. <strong>15</strong>.3 x 6.2 cm.<br />

Image courtesy <strong>of</strong> the Cultural Center<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Philippines.<br />

Left: Ray Albano. Happy Birthday<br />

Suite #4. 1981. Acrylic on chipboard<br />

on wood. 121.9 x 106.7 cm.<br />

Middle: Ray Albano. Happy Birthday<br />

Suite # 1. 1986.<br />

Right: Ray Albano. Untitled. Comic<br />

magazine strip. 30.1 x 21.5 cm<br />

Oil on canvas. 84.5 x 181 cm.<br />

Image courtesy <strong>of</strong> the Cultural Center<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Philippines.<br />

Third, the collection put together by the Museum <strong>of</strong> Philippine Art (MOPA), which<br />

was initially called by Albano as the Contemporary Art Museum <strong>of</strong> the Philippines<br />

(CAMP) was given its own building, the Elk’s Club beside the United States Embassy and<br />

adjacent to the National Park. Albano, assumed <strong>of</strong>fice <strong>of</strong> the museum at the Center one<br />

fine day in 1970 when Chabet decided not to report for work. The latter rather cavalierly<br />

says in an interview that after his brief stint at the Center, Albano was “sort <strong>of</strong> taking<br />

over.” 11 The heir apparent, who opened CAMP with the Contemporary Art in the Philippines<br />

exhibition, served with two <strong>of</strong> the period’s liveliest minds, Marian Pastor Roces<br />

and Judy Freya Sibayan. Roces later worked at the Center in 1985 under Nonon Padilla<br />

after the death <strong>of</strong> Albano and was left minding the store when Marcos was deposed in<br />

1986; Sibayan returned in 1987 as director <strong>of</strong> the museum at the Center, now renamed<br />

Contemporary Art Museum <strong>of</strong> the Philippines as an homage to Albano.<br />

The original CAMP was headed by Albano who was relieved from the post the<br />

same year it opened. Arturo Luz took over as museum director and was responsible in<br />

renaming it Museum <strong>of</strong> Philippine Art; the museum operated through the Center but was<br />

curatorially independent <strong>of</strong> it. In its effort to organize an exhibition on Philippine modern<br />

<strong>art</strong>, the MOPA solicited works from selected <strong>art</strong>ists to form a collection envisioned to be<br />

on permanent display on the second floor <strong>of</strong> a high-ceilinged California mission-revival<br />

building. Luz vetted the <strong>art</strong>ists and appealed to their generosity, though reserved the right<br />

to refuse, with no apologies. The gaps in this narrative <strong>of</strong> modernism were filled by the<br />

bequest <strong>of</strong> Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, the founding President <strong>of</strong> the Art Association <strong>of</strong> the<br />

Philippines, established in 1948, and luminary <strong>of</strong> Philippine <strong>art</strong> in the first half <strong>of</strong> the<br />

twentieth century. The MOPA presented important retrospectives <strong>of</strong> ground-breaking<br />

modernists, many <strong>of</strong> whom had been or were inevitably proclaimed National Artists by<br />

Imelda. In this space, Luz codified his scenographic signature <strong>of</strong> white-cube sleekness,<br />

brooking no awkward angle and placing pieces in order: the first one on view is the most<br />

important and impressive and that the arrangement defines the space, or better still, the<br />

interior design. He asked critics Leonidas Benesa and Cid Reyes to prepare the literature<br />

for exhibitions; and in order to sustain itself, the MOPA sold works, with a thirty<br />

percent commission on the sale. 12 This collection proved pivotal because it succeeded<br />

the Ateneo Art Gallery as a key node in the hoard <strong>of</strong> modern <strong>art</strong> in the Philippines. The<br />

Kalaw-Ledesma collection was inevitably withdrawn when the MOPA trove reverted to<br />

the CCP in the post-Marcos dispensation.<br />

35 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


The MOPA was dedicated to Philippine modern <strong>art</strong> in contradistinction to another<br />

Imelda brainchild, the Metropolitan Museum <strong>of</strong> Manila or the MET that was decidedly<br />

international in its projection, having opened in 1977 with loans from the Brooklyn<br />

Museum and other galleries or collections in the United States, 13 most notably Armand<br />

Hammer’s. Like MOPA, which commenced with a Federico Aguilar Alcuaz event under<br />

Luz’s directorship, the MET was directed by Arturo Luz. Through the years, it hosted the<br />

exhibitions <strong>of</strong> Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys, Byzantine icons, Yugoslav naïf paintings, the<br />

Vatican Collection, among countless others. The MET after Marcos, in some version <strong>of</strong><br />

the developmentalist model, pursued an “<strong>art</strong> for all” vision, and interestingly this meant<br />

overturning the Luz museography. According to Felice Sta. Maria, MET President from<br />

1986 to 1993: “For Philippine museums, adherence to the Western museum paradigm<br />

led to an isolationist image, incomprehensible texts, and ineffective programs—a total<br />

museological dysfunction…It dampened the raison d’etre <strong>of</strong> museums as cultural and<br />

educational institutions for the general public.” 14 It may seem then that post-Marcos<br />

likewise meant post-Luz.<br />

Fourth, the somewhat unpredictable and unsystematic admission <strong>of</strong> gifts, contributions,<br />

and <strong>art</strong> left behind by <strong>art</strong>ists, a practice that was practically dependent on the social<br />

networks <strong>of</strong> Imelda Marcos and Raymundo Albano, who did not have the budget to buy.<br />

There had been purchases after the Marcos period, governed by no clear-cut acquisition<br />

guidelines. This could be attributed to an anti-CCP outlook that infected the CCP, that<br />

is, an aversion to curatorial engineering. Reigning in a scenario soaked in people-power<br />

euphoria were the tedious and ultimately reactionary concepts <strong>of</strong> decolonization and<br />

indigenization, informed by the populist nationalism <strong>of</strong> a coalition <strong>of</strong> anti-dictatorship<br />

forces. The plurality that was unleashed by the fall <strong>of</strong> the house <strong>of</strong> Marcos found its expression<br />

in Piglas: Art at the Crossroads, the come-one, come-all exhibition at the Center<br />

in 1986 that, as it is in all days <strong>of</strong> deliverance, let the barbarians at the gate, anybody<br />

who thought <strong>of</strong> himself or herself as <strong>art</strong>ist, crash the fold <strong>of</strong> culture’s grand catacomb.<br />

Marian Pastor Roces interjects: “It was extremely difficult to keep the exhibit free from<br />

the emotional issues surrounding the CCP itself. It was impossible to screen out works<br />

which did not seem to have anything to do with <strong>art</strong> at the crossroads. It was, to say the<br />

least, impossible to ‘curate.’” <strong>15</strong> This could only be indicative <strong>of</strong> the semblance <strong>of</strong> strict<br />

curatorial control in the previous years and the irresistible urge to negate it when the<br />

p<strong>art</strong>y was finally over.<br />

In light <strong>of</strong> these developments at the CCP, one way <strong>of</strong> piecing together the sources<br />

<strong>of</strong> the collection would be to match exhibitions at the CCP and the existence <strong>of</strong> objects<br />

in these exhibitions with the registry. For instance, Lani Maestro’s work in the collection<br />

might have come from her exhibition at the CCP Museum Hallway in 1981 based on the<br />

visual documentation. Cid Reyes also confides that Arturo Luz bought some <strong>of</strong> his works<br />

at his Chroma exhibition at the Hyatt in 1973 on behalf <strong>of</strong> Imelda; and one <strong>of</strong> these, the<br />

tondo Volta Redonda I, is in the collection. And we take note <strong>of</strong> a Betsy Westendorp de<br />

Brias exhibition <strong>of</strong> Marcosiana in 1975; a portrait <strong>of</strong> Ferdinand Marcos is in the storage.<br />

To summarize, the collection at the Center was assembled under the broad rubrics <strong>of</strong><br />

commission, purchase, and gift. A curious note: In 1976, in time for the International<br />

Monetary Fund-World Bank Meeting, an exhibition <strong>of</strong> reproductions <strong>of</strong> modern masters<br />

(Picasso, Bacon, Magritte, Klee) was held at the CCP to shore up a proposal for a collection<br />

<strong>of</strong> international <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong> at the Center.<br />

Ethic <strong>of</strong> Collecting<br />

It may be useful to tentatively assume that the logic <strong>of</strong> collecting at the Center was<br />

contingent on a level <strong>of</strong> connoisseurship represented by the taste <strong>of</strong> Imelda Marcos and<br />

the coterie around her: Leandro Locsin, Arturo Luz, and Roberto Chabet. At the outset,<br />

a p<strong>art</strong>icular type <strong>of</strong> internationalist abstraction <strong>of</strong> a late modern pedigree would frame<br />

this disposition, although Imelda also favored nativist inclinations in the works <strong>of</strong>, let us<br />

say, Carlos Francisco <strong>of</strong> Angono, Rizal. Locsin’s design <strong>of</strong> the building, a cross between<br />

brutalist minimalism and nativist quotation <strong>of</strong> the bahay kubo (nipa hut) morphology,<br />

set the tone, inflected by the exacting predilections <strong>of</strong> Luz and, later, Chabet. They<br />

36 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


epresented a kind <strong>of</strong> modernism that may be described as highly discriminating, maybe<br />

even elitist and indifferent to the Filipino penchant for ebullient decoration. And so to a<br />

certain extent, there could be a line drawn between the patronage <strong>of</strong> a dictatorship in the<br />

<strong>art</strong>s and a patronizing attitude among a segment <strong>of</strong> the intelligentsia towards a people<br />

who, it might have thought, needed a new cycle <strong>of</strong> modernist civilization, one that was<br />

not folkloric and pastoral. This was an approach foiled, however, by the “fiesta” ambience<br />

<strong>of</strong> Raymundo Albano’s CCP as well as <strong>of</strong> its satellites like Patio Kamalig and Third<br />

Level Gallery at Shoe M<strong>art</strong> Cubao, which accommodated an array <strong>of</strong> hits and misses,<br />

from Fluxus to Mabini <strong>art</strong>, Russian socialist realism to Picasso.<br />

Another trajectory <strong>of</strong> collecting could have been, as earlier mentioned, the<br />

comradeship <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> unit’s longest-serving curator (1970-1985), Raymundo Albano.<br />

A preliminary look at the records <strong>of</strong> the collection reveals that a significant number <strong>of</strong><br />

works are by <strong>art</strong>ists with close <strong>art</strong>istic ties to Albano, including Rodolfo Samonte (who<br />

guest-curated Gridworks in 1975) and Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi. Albano was sui generis,<br />

an <strong>art</strong>ist <strong>of</strong> ample affinities (painting, printmaking, performance, photography, installation),<br />

curator <strong>of</strong> myriad persuasions, and a prolific poet and writer who was able to<br />

<strong>art</strong>iculate the philosophical underpinnings <strong>of</strong> his imaginings. Among his projects at the<br />

Center were the <strong>journal</strong> Philippine Art Supplement (1981); representation <strong>of</strong> Philippine<br />

<strong>art</strong> abroad (Paris, Fukuoka, ASEAN); <strong>art</strong> for the regions (Baguio, Los Baños, Cebu); the<br />

CCP Annual (1976); and outreach through the Community Involvement Program and<br />

regular <strong>art</strong> workshops centering on pattern and grid system and alternative materials. The<br />

liaison between experimentation and sorties into the gallery system prompted the <strong>art</strong>ist<br />

Alan Rivera to quip that “conceptual <strong>art</strong> can be blue-chipped.” 16<br />

The shift from Albano to Chabet bears some elaboration. Albano’s bent was antithetical<br />

to Chabet’s insouciance, which was in turn akin to Luz’s sense <strong>of</strong> entitlement:<br />

they saw no need to explain the power to make <strong>art</strong> and produce its value, let alone lay the<br />

predicate <strong>of</strong> its alleged interrogation. For an <strong>art</strong>ist like Chabet who sought to unravel the<br />

mystification <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> through the mechanism <strong>of</strong> language, this streak <strong>of</strong> genius bordered on<br />

bogus high formalism. His ideas gained adherents beyond the Center because he taught<br />

at the University <strong>of</strong> the Philippines: the rarefied precincts <strong>of</strong> Diliman unfortunately bred<br />

acolytes who to this day deign very little tolerance for <strong>art</strong> that does not go their way. Chabet,<br />

who was prone to tearing things to pieces like Manuel Duldulao’s book in CCP and<br />

a hand-out in MOPA, was the central intelligence <strong>of</strong> the Thirteen Artists Award (1970),<br />

which raised the consciousness for <strong>art</strong>ists who demonstrated a “recentness that hopes to<br />

endure.” 17 He waxed optimistic on its commencement: “They are a new generation <strong>of</strong><br />

<strong>art</strong>ists that promise to dominate Philippine <strong>art</strong>…Their works show recentness, a turning<br />

away from past, familiar modes <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>making…(made) credible by a keen awareness <strong>of</strong><br />

<strong>art</strong>istic problems, an <strong>art</strong>iculate command <strong>of</strong> means to pursue innovative solutions…a<br />

confident commitment to ideas…Their influence is being felt in the works <strong>of</strong> other young<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists…They have accelerated the motion initiated by our earlier modernists…they<br />

constantly restructure, restrengthen and renew <strong>art</strong>making and <strong>art</strong> thinking that lend viability<br />

to Philippine <strong>art</strong>.” Above all, they have ambition: “In this exhibition we have in<br />

evidence a certain expansiveness <strong>of</strong> scale and largeness <strong>of</strong> concept that are intimations in<br />

which the promise each <strong>art</strong>ist has shown in recent years is finding fulfillment.” 18 These<br />

are l<strong>of</strong>ty words, but the recipients through time could no longer be exclusively tied to<br />

Chabet’s discernment. Also, Albano’s CCP Annual in hindsight may have been more<br />

generative: “The essential irony <strong>of</strong> the annual is that all the works are test-markers for<br />

things to expect in the future. The works are highly <strong>contemporary</strong>, which means that<br />

they are risk-takers, transitory. They have not been validated yet, so to speak, and they<br />

may look like diversions or ends to a series. But it is this risk taking that <strong>art</strong>ist’s works<br />

become useful in questioning and provoking certain attitudes. There are no perfected<br />

works here (there may be some masterpieces) but, eventually, we will realize that many<br />

prove to be sparks <strong>of</strong> innovative ideas, pivotal points.” 19 The relationship between the<br />

Thirteen Artists award exhibitions and the CCP Annual merits further study.<br />

Finally, the practice <strong>of</strong> collecting <strong>art</strong> at the Center was preceded by a more institutional<br />

method <strong>of</strong> collection evidenced by the spaces devoted to the ethnographic and<br />

37 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


archaeological collections <strong>of</strong> the landowner-interior designer Arturo de Santos and the<br />

dealer-couturier Potenciano Badillo, principally consisting <strong>of</strong> trade ware, ceramics, and<br />

Maranao and Maguindanao <strong>art</strong>ifacts. It is said that Imelda promised the two collectors<br />

a building to house their holdings; and in fact piles had been driven in an area close to<br />

the Folk Arts Theater for this purpose. But plans fell through. After the Marcoses were<br />

forced out <strong>of</strong> the palace in 1986, Marian Pastor Roces, curator <strong>of</strong> the newly formed Museo<br />

ng Kalinangang Pilipino, returned the pieces to their owners. We mark this moment<br />

<strong>of</strong> collecting at the Center because its presence may help us understand more clearly<br />

the invented distinction between “fine <strong>art</strong>” and “ethnology,” on the one hand, and how<br />

these two genus <strong>of</strong> objects could come together under the aegis <strong>of</strong> museumification as<br />

heritage or antiquity or commodity, on the other. These are aspects <strong>of</strong> modernity that are<br />

imperative, because tressorial, and moreover p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> wealth that is Filipiniana. We must<br />

remember that when the Marcoses left the Philippines, the revolutionary government <strong>of</strong><br />

Corazon Aquino confiscated p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the Marcos <strong>art</strong> collection, ranging from Raphael to<br />

Zurbaran. Christie’s auctioned <strong>of</strong>f some <strong>of</strong> these pieces on behalf <strong>of</strong> the Presidential Commission<br />

on Good Government in 1991, with the proceeds <strong>of</strong> the sale funding the country’s<br />

Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Earlier, the auction house peddled furniture,<br />

silver, and decorative accessories from the family’s town house and ap<strong>art</strong>ment in New<br />

York City. The catalogue reports that a number <strong>of</strong> Impressionist and modern works were<br />

still being tracked down, including Monet’s La pluie and L’eglise a la Seine; Renoir’s<br />

Jeune fille au bord de l’eau; and Picasso’s Reclining Woman and Head <strong>of</strong> a Woman. In<br />

other words, collecting at the Center was paved by a deep provenance <strong>of</strong> collecting in<br />

the Philippines by both the old rich and arrivistes, from Felipe Hidalgo to Luis Araneta<br />

to Leandro Locsin.<br />

The Modern as Collectible<br />

With the collection in place, a little more than a thousand odd pieces in total, this<br />

exhibition ch<strong>art</strong>s the coordinates across which objects make sense as things within<br />

a contrived scheme, a curatorial intervention in our own time: the new, the now, the<br />

next—terms referring to modernity and its critical inheritance. This is a first foray and<br />

therefore fraught with inconsistencies and plagued by theoretical problems. But before<br />

such, typologies at this point are de rigueur. We cast a taxonomic web to catch a better<br />

vantage <strong>of</strong> the collection:<br />

1. Art history: The collection may be viewed <strong>art</strong> historically as representing types <strong>of</strong><br />

Philippine modernism but not necessarily in linear mode:<br />

a) Incipient: from the Triumvirate to Thirteen Moderns<br />

b) Neorealist and Philippine Art Gallery cohort: from School <strong>of</strong> Paris to<br />

non-objective to David Cortez Medalla<br />

c) Abstract: geometric and gestural, with Arturo Luz represented with the<br />

most number <strong>of</strong> works<br />

d) Avant-garde/Conceptualist, with one flank moving towards greater<br />

self-referentiality, and the other towards greater plurality, including Roberto<br />

Chabet’s 12-piece steel installation Hurdling and Santiago Bose’s door pieces<br />

e) Ne<strong>of</strong>igurative, with printmaking as dominant medium and access <strong>of</strong> women<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists to the scene and the canon; and Bendedicto Cabrera’s Larawan<br />

series as watershed<br />

f) Expressionist, including the large works <strong>of</strong> Jaime de Guzman<br />

g) Social Realist, which has minimal representation<br />

2. Will to form (Aesthetic Urge)<br />

a) Play: experimental, ephemeral, anti-<strong>art</strong>, anti-museum<br />

b) Essence: abstraction, action painting, formalism, language games<br />

c) Culture: local color, identity, motif<br />

d) History: colonial critique, narrative<br />

38 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


3. Logic <strong>of</strong> practice<br />

a) Performative, including the painterly: dematerialization<br />

b) Reprographic: multiple circulation<br />

c) Expressive and expressionist: classicism, sense <strong>of</strong> beauty, anxiety, abjection<br />

d) Picturesque and kitsch: idealization <strong>of</strong> everyday life, commodification<br />

<strong>of</strong> idyll and folk resilience<br />

NEW: Bago ang Lahat<br />

First, the modern is ordained, the new is positioned at the outset, with Edades’s The<br />

Builders as a contentious locus classicus and myth. 20 Around it are ciphers <strong>of</strong> an earlier<br />

academism or conservatism embodied by such exemplars as Fernando Amorsolo and<br />

Guillermo Tolentino, and a relatively unacknowledged liminal figure in the emergent<br />

modernist enterprise, Diosdado Lorenzo. Implicated in this incipient system <strong>of</strong> the historiography<br />

<strong>of</strong> modernism is the temper <strong>of</strong> Leandro Locsin and Arturo Luz in the context<br />

<strong>of</strong> geometric abstraction and internationalist architecture. The so-called Triumvirate <strong>of</strong><br />

Victorio Edades, Carlos Francisco, and Galo Ocampo plays out here, as well as its furtherance<br />

in the much-pr<strong>of</strong>iled but ultimately apocryphal Thirteen Moderns. Beyond the<br />

Ash Can school <strong>of</strong> American realism and post-Impressionism <strong>of</strong> Edades lies the domain<br />

<strong>of</strong> neorealism, a Filipino neologism in modern <strong>art</strong> vocabulary <strong>of</strong> which cubism was the<br />

dominant aesthetic. The neorealist style, which was honed through exhibitions at the<br />

Philippine Art Gallery, had broad sympathies, extending to the <strong>art</strong> brut experiments <strong>of</strong><br />

David Cortez Medalla. A treasure in the collection is a suite <strong>of</strong> the latter’s drawings <strong>of</strong><br />

Fernando Zobel lecturing on <strong>art</strong> history at the Ateneo de Manila University in the fifties;<br />

along with Leonidas Benesa and Emmanuel Torres, both <strong>of</strong> whom became Philippine<br />

modern <strong>art</strong>’s leading critics, and Tessie Ojeda, who married Luz, Medalla was a student <strong>of</strong><br />

Zobel who was at once painter, patron, and polemicist on Filipino culture. 21 Needless to<br />

say, the collection counts several Zobels as its cherished possessions. Concomitantly, the<br />

belief in the international, with Zobel as a foreign element in the vicinity, was overriding,<br />

a testament to Philippine cosmopolitan culture. This much Luz intuited: “I have a feeling,<br />

my work included, that most <strong>of</strong> our paintings and sculptures are a reflection <strong>of</strong> something<br />

happening worldwide, and for want <strong>of</strong> a better word, this trend is now being identified as<br />

‘international.’ In fact we always refer to it as being an international phenomenon, and<br />

in the process, this trend obliterates national characteristics, and transcends geographical<br />

boundaries.” 22 Zobel may have been the vector <strong>of</strong> the international in the nation, while<br />

Medalla referenced a post-national Philippine <strong>art</strong> outside the nation.<br />

Moreover, this section integrates the transition from abstraction to what may be<br />

provisionally called ne<strong>of</strong>iguration from which an emergent social realism, the style<br />

that undermined the argument <strong>of</strong> Marcos development p<strong>art</strong>ly through Marxist thought,<br />

derived p<strong>art</strong>s <strong>of</strong> its grammar. Here the works <strong>of</strong> Solomon Saprid, Ang Kiukok, Danilo<br />

Dalena, and Benedicto Cabrera are remarkable in relation to, for instance, the abstract<br />

expressionist pieces <strong>of</strong> Jose Joya, who with Napoleon Abueva, represented the country<br />

at the Venice Biennale in 1964. The alternation between deformation/abjection and nostalgia/melancholy<br />

condenses in this kind <strong>of</strong> expressionism <strong>of</strong> folksy and urban grit and<br />

post-abstract graphic <strong>art</strong>. It frustrates the heroism <strong>of</strong> the painterly stroke, the disinterest<br />

<strong>of</strong> the perspicacious line, and the kitsch <strong>of</strong> late neorealism’s penchant for vendors, shanties,<br />

and New Society propaganda.<br />

The search for a level <strong>of</strong> Filipino identity bedeviled Philippine <strong>art</strong> in the seventies.<br />

After 1986, with the restoration <strong>of</strong> so-called democratic space and its attendant ethos,<br />

a template was contemplated to nuance this issue, proceeding from the revived CAMP<br />

helmed by Nonon Padilla who drew up a ten-year program <strong>of</strong> three phases: the dialectical,<br />

questioning aesthetics, identity, issues and orientation; the analysis <strong>of</strong> the visual <strong>art</strong>s<br />

as a reflection <strong>of</strong> Philippine culture; and the definition <strong>of</strong> Philippine culture as expressed<br />

in <strong>contemporary</strong> visual <strong>art</strong>s. The Sensuous Eye (1987) evolved out <strong>of</strong> the need for this<br />

introspection, as well as for trying to address gaps in curatorship in the Philippines, which<br />

according to Judy Freya Sibayan “has not reached a level <strong>of</strong> systems.” Thus, the intent <strong>of</strong><br />

the exhibition was both analytic and curatorial: to “re-think how Filipino <strong>art</strong>ists create and<br />

39 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


why they create the way they do,” on the one hand, and to advance the central aesthetic<br />

thesis that “ours is an <strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> objectifying visual pleasure,” 23 on the other. The walls were<br />

painted peach, alluding to the “physicalization <strong>of</strong> pleasure”: the exhibitionary and the<br />

<strong>art</strong>istic merge. The critic Cid Reyes was able to propose categories <strong>of</strong> analysis for this<br />

p<strong>art</strong>icular pursuit <strong>of</strong> a Filipino aesthetic in painting: frontality <strong>of</strong> image; fragmentation:<br />

openness <strong>of</strong> forms; décor: enhancements <strong>of</strong> the picture plane; horror vacui: appropriation<br />

<strong>of</strong> space; ‘focal point’: leading the eye to pasture; recession: shallow space; and color:<br />

radiation <strong>of</strong> energy.” 24<br />

This was the second and may have been the last serious attempt <strong>of</strong> the CCP to<br />

strive for discursive density in relation to its collection. The first one was done in 1980<br />

with the exhibition curated by the critic and printmaker Rodolfo Paras Perez titled Five<br />

Directions; it attempted to map out “for meditation the various permutations, perplexities,<br />

the five identifiable tendencies, the ambitions deemed characteristic <strong>of</strong> Philippine<br />

<strong>art</strong>” 25 : non-objectivist, macro-visionist, magic realist, Laguna lake shore, conceptualist.<br />

Curiously missing was the social realist aesthetic that had already potently posited its<br />

agenda since 1971, finding its impetus with the founding <strong>of</strong> Kaisahan in 1976. Surely,<br />

the omission was obvious: the MOPA might not have wanted to present <strong>art</strong> that tried to<br />

disclose an abject social condition, a far cry from Imelda’s idealized City <strong>of</strong> Man, for<br />

which the government was responsible. This policing was, therefore, political, something<br />

that might have also permeated the choices for the Thirteen Artists. As social realist<br />

Renato Habulan would reflect on his belated conferment in 1990 along with confreres<br />

Pablo Baens Santos, Edgar Talusan Fernandez, Antipas Delotavo, and Neil Doloricon:<br />

“Our selection was a vindication <strong>of</strong> work that was deserving but could not be displayed<br />

because <strong>of</strong> the dissenting political implication they held during the Marcos era. We<br />

may have even deserved nomination in the 1970s, but this could not happen under the<br />

(Marcos)administration.” 26 This umbrage is not as simple as it looks, because on the<br />

other hand, the modernist canon makers in New York like Museum <strong>of</strong> Modern Art’s<br />

Alfred Barr during the Cold War would juxtapose the freedom <strong>of</strong> abstract expressionism<br />

with the fascism <strong>of</strong> socialist realism.<br />

Marian Pastor Roces reviewed Five Directions and thought it iterative and recursive:<br />

it “moves into itself and around and over again, in a steady, non-corrective, immutable,<br />

static, state.” 27 While viewed as curatorially faulty, this exhibition, along with The Sensuous<br />

Eye, constitutes the only consolidated effort <strong>of</strong> the Center to assess its collection,<br />

coextensively and implicitly with its exhibitions, in relation to both aesthetics and <strong>art</strong><br />

history. From this stock taking, we could infer <strong>art</strong>istic leanings in terms <strong>of</strong> themes, forms,<br />

and ideas, on the one hand, and a deeper structure <strong>of</strong> an aesthetic sensibility that is constantly<br />

eluded by its grail that is the Filipino, on the other.<br />

NOW: Simula Pa Lamang<br />

The turn away from neorealism towards the <strong>contemporary</strong> may have been heralded<br />

by Raymundo Albano at the Center, who insisted on working on the now, its labor as<br />

the advent <strong>of</strong> an alternative universe that was present—and that was only the beginning.<br />

Albano widened the parameters <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> and invested the modern not only with the notion<br />

<strong>of</strong> the new, but the urgency <strong>of</strong> the now, its being essential in development that must seize<br />

the day, demanding quick action and being forward looking, the better perhaps to slay<br />

the feudal time <strong>of</strong> oligarchy that Marcos so despised, assiduously tried to dismantle, and<br />

replaced with technocrats and cronies <strong>of</strong> a developing nation state.<br />

It is in this segment <strong>of</strong> the exhibition that the documentation <strong>of</strong> the projects at the<br />

Center becomes extremely helpful. Albano diligently annotated them, dutifully wrote<br />

curatorial briefs, and kept photographs in tidy volumes that serve as our map to the<br />

labyrinths <strong>of</strong> the spaces and the laboratories that they had become in the seventies and<br />

eighties. We may designate this juncture as the carnival world and adventure time <strong>of</strong> Albano,<br />

one <strong>of</strong> the most solvent periods in Philippine <strong>art</strong> history, rivaled only by the hectic<br />

routine at the Philippine Art Gallery and the steady production <strong>of</strong> protest <strong>art</strong> during the<br />

Marcos administration.<br />

40 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


NEXT: Abangan ang Susunod<br />

Roberto Chabet was the fountainhead <strong>of</strong> the visual <strong>art</strong>s at the CCP at its inception,<br />

cobbling together a fortress <strong>of</strong> state-controlled culture for the masses with a motley crew<br />

<strong>of</strong> M<strong>art</strong>ial Law architects, high-society personalities, and academics—from Juan Ponce<br />

Enrile to Antonio Madrigal to Fr. Horacio de la Costa. But Chabet’s presence as curator<br />

was short-lived. His lasting legacy, however, is the Thirteen Artists Award that he imagined<br />

as signaling <strong>art</strong> on the threshold. He was proud <strong>of</strong> the first laureates, though had<br />

reservations about the second, which he thought were mostly “mediocre.” According to<br />

him: “In the second Thirteen Artists show…I had to include things which I didn’t know<br />

about. I was surprised to find them included in the show. Somebody had disorganized<br />

the show!” 28<br />

This is vintage Chabet, who has only contempt for <strong>art</strong>ists who try too hard to do<br />

work that looks like <strong>art</strong>, calling them “the acrylic embroiderers” and the “San Andres sitting<br />

circle,” comprising the new Mabini <strong>art</strong>ists, and are “nincompoops.” 29 To distinguish<br />

himself from these wastrels in his estimation, he casts himself as “experimental,” the<br />

adjective he uses to describe what he had been doing; and as critical, taking on the task<br />

<strong>of</strong> a critic who questions the “nature <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>.” 30 In this modality <strong>of</strong> valorizing the mind<br />

over the hand, he would advocate, for instance, the use <strong>of</strong> the “pr<strong>of</strong>essional craftsman” to<br />

execute the <strong>art</strong>ist’s design: “It’s the only way to do it.” 31 This is the avant-garde capital<br />

that Chabet arrogated unto himself, arbitrarily <strong>of</strong> course.<br />

Chabet would disclose in an interview years later that the CCP was “not doing its<br />

function properly.” When queried what this function was, he retorted: “I really don’t know.<br />

Maybe that’s another reason why I resigned. I don’t know and I don’t care.” 32 This may<br />

be symptomatic <strong>of</strong> the rift between Chabet and the enviable lush afterlife <strong>of</strong> conceptual<br />

<strong>art</strong> after his dep<strong>art</strong>ure from the CCP; it also betrays the hauteur, conceit, and his inability<br />

to make himself accountable to the modernist obligations <strong>of</strong> reflexivity.<br />

This exhibition recalls the gains <strong>of</strong> the Thirteen Artists recognition not only through<br />

the collection, but also through the work <strong>of</strong> the recipients <strong>of</strong> the award, specifically the<br />

installations <strong>of</strong> Reginald Yuson and Poklong Anading that reference, for the former, a<br />

Japanese garden <strong>of</strong> bullet shells, and, for the latter, debris <strong>of</strong> the city’s road painted in the<br />

colors <strong>of</strong> rags. Both projects are at once gritty and melancholic, testifying to the poetics<br />

<strong>of</strong> ruination resting on a building resting on land resting on water. This should be able to<br />

glimpse a future that is the heritage <strong>of</strong> this coveted honor, for good or for ill.<br />

Inchoate Notes<br />

This exhibition <strong>of</strong> the visual <strong>art</strong>s collection <strong>of</strong> the Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines<br />

occasions a probe <strong>of</strong> the history <strong>of</strong> its becoming, the very nature <strong>of</strong> the collecting<br />

impulse, and inexorably, <strong>of</strong> the construction <strong>of</strong> the collective. A couple <strong>of</strong> conclusions<br />

could be put on the table.<br />

First are the intricate relationships among institutions that circulated <strong>art</strong> that deserved<br />

and was desired to be collected as property, as well as index <strong>of</strong> progress, refinement,<br />

radical expression, experiment, and patrimony. Here specific codes <strong>of</strong> quality were ratified<br />

through sheer confirmation <strong>of</strong> taste in acquisition, exhibition making, workshops,<br />

cohort formation, and award giving (Thirteen Artists in 1970 and National Artist in<br />

1972). In this situation, the CCP as the state’s premier bureaucracy for modern <strong>art</strong> was<br />

involved in generating symbolic capital for objects that were not merely regarded as<br />

species <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> history or the history <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>, which implied some kind <strong>of</strong> progression from<br />

a perceived indigenous origin to a telos <strong>of</strong> sophistication, but as goods <strong>of</strong> the market<br />

and <strong>art</strong>ifacts <strong>of</strong> a museum that meet certain standards and cannot be easily reduced as<br />

instruments <strong>of</strong> the economies in which they are entangled. This confluence would be<br />

facilitated by the personage and prerogative <strong>of</strong> Arturo Luz, who at one time directed<br />

three <strong>art</strong> institutions—the Design Center Philippines (1973), the Museum <strong>of</strong> Philippine<br />

Art, and the Metropolitan Museum <strong>of</strong> Manila – and owned the Luz Gallery, heir <strong>of</strong> the<br />

Philippine Art Gallery and Manila’s most respected <strong>art</strong> gallery at that time; according<br />

to Raymundo Albano, the latter was the only platform for the unsaleable conceptualist<br />

<strong>art</strong> 33 and, in fact was contracted to program and manage MOPA’s exhibitions. It may not<br />

be too imprudent to aver then that many <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong>ists exhibited at the MOPA were also<br />

41 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


in the roster <strong>of</strong> the Luz Gallery. In other words, there seemed to be a singular circuit<br />

through which a distinct mode <strong>of</strong> modernism found its relay: this was for all intents and<br />

purposes on the watch <strong>of</strong> Luz, who was widely respected for his mandarin sensibility and<br />

fastidiousness as <strong>art</strong>ist, curator, and administrator. We note this tyranny <strong>of</strong> taste: “Actually,<br />

my principal reason was simply to provide <strong>art</strong> with the setting and importance it<br />

deserves. Bad painting deserves obscurity, but painting that deserves to be shown must<br />

Left: Arturo Luz. For Xavier Gonzales,<br />

1978. Painted burlap on wood,<br />

102.9 x 221.6 cm<br />

Middle: Arturo Luz, Untitled. 2007. Metal<br />

Right: Arturo Luz. Nightglow. 1960.<br />

Oil on canvas. 84.5 x 181 cm.<br />

Image courtesy <strong>of</strong> the Cultural Center<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Philippines.<br />

be shown well. Surprisingly, virtually all other galleries in Manila ignore this obvious<br />

truth…More obvious though less popular is my notion that galleries have to be dictatorial<br />

in matters <strong>of</strong> taste and quality…The point is that galleries have certain functions and<br />

responsibilities other than to make pr<strong>of</strong>it…Above all, it (the gallery) should mold taste<br />

and exercise a certain degree <strong>of</strong> critical judgment.” 34 This acuity in hindsight made the<br />

Gallery a veritable bellwether <strong>of</strong> the first Thirteen Artists awardees in 1970: in 1968, the<br />

20 Artists exhibition was practically the mirror-image <strong>of</strong> the latter.<br />

Moreover, Luz proved to be a vital element in the <strong>art</strong> world because <strong>of</strong> his links<br />

to a very influential circle <strong>of</strong> standard-setters and opinion-makers in the sixties and the<br />

seventies. We may trace the lineage <strong>of</strong> this elite to Fernando Zobel whose role as <strong>art</strong>ist,<br />

benefactor, and intellectual shaped hegemonic formations in the <strong>art</strong> world. His bequest<br />

to the Ateneo was the nucleus <strong>of</strong> the Ateneo Art Gallery, the first institution <strong>of</strong> modern<br />

<strong>art</strong> in the Philippines that p<strong>art</strong>ly enhanced the auspice <strong>of</strong> Luz by way <strong>of</strong> exhibitions <strong>of</strong><br />

his <strong>art</strong>, including the ten-year retrospective that Ateneo pr<strong>of</strong>essor and critic Emmanuel<br />

Torres curated in 1966, the same year Luz received the Republic Heritage Award. Torres<br />

likewise wrote a book on his drawings and at one time conceptualized an exhibition <strong>of</strong><br />

Philippine <strong>art</strong>, running the length from the nineteenth century master Juan Luna to Luz.<br />

This clique also included the pianist and theater <strong>art</strong>ist Leandro Locsin, chief architect <strong>of</strong><br />

Imelda and the Ayalas, and later Roberto Chabet, who exhibited his early Malang-like<br />

works at the Luz Gallery. More importantly, they thought highly <strong>of</strong> each other. When<br />

asked who among the local painters <strong>of</strong> his time he esteemed most, Zobel would point to<br />

Luz if he “had to name a single person...his clarity, the pr<strong>of</strong>ound honesty <strong>of</strong> his work,<br />

the elegance <strong>of</strong> his restraint, have to do with everything I admire.” 35 Luz for his p<strong>art</strong> is<br />

indebted to Chabet for the evolution <strong>of</strong> his collages. The crucial coordinates would be<br />

Luz, Locsin, and Chabet. Locsin and Luz may have been kindred spirits. A story has<br />

gone around that one time when the two were asked to select ten objects, they had similar<br />

choices. They were attuned to the same wavelength in terms <strong>of</strong> their regard for space,<br />

intellect, and class affectation. Albano, who came from Ilocos Norte and was not reared<br />

in privilege, did not belong to this orbit.<br />

All told, as Alfredo Roces would put it: “Luz had the gallery, Locsin had the building<br />

and clientele and Zobel had the theories and even the patronage.” 36 In this regard, Tessie<br />

Luz relates that “there was a small group <strong>of</strong> collectors who revolved around Zobel and<br />

Lindy Locsin.” 37 Furthermore, Zobel had a hand in the founding <strong>of</strong> the Ayala Museum<br />

in 1961, on the heels <strong>of</strong> the establishment <strong>of</strong> the Ateneo Art Gallery, the Luz Gallery,<br />

and the Lopez Memorial Museum the previous year; it opened to the public in 1967.<br />

In 1974, it moved to Makati in a building designed by Locsin. The Ayalas nurtured the<br />

country’s oldest business house and was its pioneer monopolist. 38 Zobel’s cousin Jaime<br />

Zobel de Ayala, the industrialist and tycoon whose family practically owns the financial<br />

district Makati and the country’s gated enclaves, was CCP’s first Executive Director<br />

and President. These connections are very telling. The history <strong>of</strong> Ayala as a firm and<br />

proto-conglomerate and how Jaime would try to elide class in the production <strong>of</strong> culture<br />

through the CCP are equally compelling: “The Center, they say, is only for the affluent.<br />

42 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


It is not committed because it does not take a class stand. It does not identify itself with<br />

the masses and is not led by the ideology <strong>of</strong> the present struggle. True, the Center does<br />

not and cannot adopt this kind <strong>of</strong> orientation. It does not divide the people into classes.<br />

But it is committed. Its commitment is to <strong>art</strong> and <strong>art</strong> alone. It shall not be subservient to<br />

any ideological belief.” 39<br />

Finally, the developmentalist bent that guided the policies and programs <strong>of</strong> the<br />

Center, as previously indicated, may have conspired to craft a cosmopolitan aesthetic<br />

that principally dwelled on design. This is validated by a strong investment in design<br />

that encompassed both the primitive and the avant-garde as could be discerned, again,<br />

in the initiatives <strong>of</strong> Luz at the Design Center Philippines where he developed buri and<br />

hand-made paper as local materials within an interior-design context; his burlap series<br />

provides the nexus to <strong>art</strong>. Therefore, the intersection between fine <strong>art</strong>, interior design,<br />

architecture, tourism, convention city building (hotels, theaters, coliseums), and other<br />

Marcos ambitions brought together practitioners who built edifices and decorated them<br />

with <strong>art</strong>, furniture, and antiques. The ap<strong>art</strong>ments Locsin designed in Makati and how<br />

Left: David Cortez Medalla. Parables<br />

<strong>of</strong> Friendship. 1984. Oil on canvas.<br />

50.8 x 76.2 cm.<br />

Middle: J. Elizalde Navarro. 1981.<br />

Homage to Carlos V. Francisco.<br />

Acrylic and oil on canvas. 86 x 160 cm.<br />

Right: Hernando R. Ocampo. Homage to<br />

Diego Silang.1976. Oil on canvas.<br />

84.5 x 181 cm.<br />

Image courtesy <strong>of</strong> the Cultural Center<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Philippines<br />

their interiors were done may be exemplary. But more than this, as David Cortez Medalla<br />

confided in an interview, it was the shift <strong>of</strong> the <strong>art</strong> scene from Manila, which was bohemia<br />

to the culturati <strong>of</strong> a fabled era, to Makati that decisively altered the kind <strong>of</strong> modernism<br />

that was to take root. 40 The Luz Gallery in Herran moved to Makati in a Locsin building<br />

along EDSA in 1966; and Luz secured commissions for public <strong>art</strong> in the area. We are <strong>of</strong><br />

the mind that this transfer, which according to Medalla (represented in When Attitudes<br />

Become Form in 1969; Documenta in 1972; Venice in 1980) deprived modernism <strong>of</strong> its<br />

social texture and made it pretentiously cerebral, aborted a potentially robust avant-garde<br />

that was nipped in the bud by the high modernism <strong>of</strong> Luz and Chabet. It was only during<br />

Albano’s tenure at the CCP that this orientation was meaningfully reversed, but only to<br />

the degree that it tried to simulate an <strong>art</strong>ificial condition <strong>of</strong> “happening” minus political<br />

happenstance.<br />

This developmentalist framework could be key to the unevenness <strong>of</strong> the collection,<br />

a sign <strong>of</strong> the kind <strong>of</strong> the fulcrum on which a native/national, truly neo-ethnic Filipino<br />

teetered. It is a balance that may have also informed the expressions <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists active at the<br />

Center: the avant-garde ethnomusicology <strong>of</strong> Lucrecia Kasilag and Jose Maceda (whose<br />

Ugnayan broadcast sound across Manila through the radio on new year’s day in 1974)<br />

and the modernist theater <strong>of</strong> Rolando Tinio who translated with irresistible rigor Euro-<br />

American canonical pieces into cogent Filipino. Ballet and folkloric dance companies;<br />

piano concerts in basktetball courts; philharmonic orchestras and <strong>art</strong> workshops for children,<br />

opera troupes and local playwrighting were developmentalist endeavors that reached<br />

out to the vast masses <strong>of</strong> Filipinos. Tinio had the perfect formulation for this program:<br />

“The classics <strong>of</strong> the world are like natural resources; we mine them and manufacture<br />

from them products for local consumption, first and foremost.” 41 But Albano was able<br />

to explicate this rationale not so much for development as for the process <strong>of</strong> developing<br />

something unknown: “For an establishment to accept and promote such unrecognizable<br />

visual propositions was rather controversial, and yet it was the only workable plan possible.<br />

Exhibiting more established works would be duplicating the commercial galleries.<br />

A permanent collection is not possible to have because the CCP has no building and<br />

accompanying budget yet. A bias for interdisciplinary tendency stems from the fact that<br />

the Cultural Center promotes the ‘seven <strong>art</strong>s’ together.” 42<br />

43 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Endnotes<br />

1. Albano, Raymundo. 1981. “Developmental<br />

Art in the Philippines.” Philippine<br />

Art Supplement. Vol 2 Number 4, p. <strong>15</strong>.<br />

2. Luz, Arturo. “Filipino Painting.” n. d.<br />

3. Albano 1981, p. <strong>15</strong>.<br />

4. Albano 1981, p. <strong>15</strong>.<br />

5. Albano 1981, p. <strong>15</strong>.<br />

6. An account points to other donations<br />

like a mural from Fernando Zobel<br />

and a curtain from Federico Aguilar<br />

Alcuaz, both <strong>of</strong> which seem not to exist;<br />

mentioned as well are the collections <strong>of</strong><br />

Antonio Bantug and Arsenio Escudero.<br />

See De la Torre, Visitacion. 1984.<br />

Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines:<br />

Crystal Years. Manila: Cultural Center <strong>of</strong><br />

the Philippines, p. 19.<br />

7. Locsin, Leandro. 1969. “Physical<br />

Aspects <strong>of</strong> the Center.” Inaugural<br />

Program. Manila: Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the<br />

Philippines.<br />

8. Reyes, Cid. 1989. Conversations on<br />

Philippine Art. Manila: Cultural Center <strong>of</strong><br />

the Philippines, p. 126.<br />

9. De la Torre 1984, pp. 132-133.<br />

10. Ocampo, Galo. 1963. A Brief History<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Development <strong>of</strong> Modern Art in the<br />

Philippines: From 1928 to 1962. Manila:<br />

National Museum, p. 32.<br />

11. Reyes 1989, p. 126.<br />

12. Interview with Purissima Benitez-<br />

Johannot, curatorial staff at MOPA,<br />

December 2008.<br />

13. For thorough discussion <strong>of</strong> the MET,<br />

see Paulino, Roberto. 2005. “The Metropolitan<br />

Museum <strong>of</strong> Manila.” Pananaw 5.<br />

Manila: National Commission for Culture<br />

and the Arts, pp. 30-47.<br />

14. Paulino 2005, p. 37.<br />

<strong>15</strong>. Pastor Roces, Marian. 1986. Piglas:<br />

Art at the Crossroads. Manila: Cultural<br />

Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines, p. 5.<br />

16. Rivera, A. F. Alfon. 1981. “Art at the<br />

Third Level.” Philippine Art Supplement.<br />

Vol 2 Number 1, p.16.<br />

17. 1988 Thirteen Artists Brochure.<br />

Manila: Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the<br />

Philippines, n. p.<br />

18. 1988 Thirteen Artists Brochure, n.p.<br />

19.Tence Ruiz, Jose. 2000. “Atras/Avant:<br />

Lessons from a Continuing Reinvention<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Thirteen Artists.” Pananaw 4.<br />

Manila: National Commission for Culture<br />

and the Arts, p. 56.<br />

Second, Marian Pastor Roces advances the astute insight that the CCP visual <strong>art</strong><br />

collection may be viewed as spinning <strong>of</strong>f discretely from the <strong>art</strong> and exhibitions <strong>of</strong> the<br />

seventies at the Center. 43 This stems from the fact that the experiments then were basically<br />

anti-object, keen on dematerialization, basking in ephemera. And so, it may be<br />

argued that this acumen was an immanent critique <strong>of</strong> the necessity <strong>of</strong> a collection at that<br />

time and the way in which the collection festers in the current climate when first-world<br />

amenities are unavailable to arrest the entropy <strong>of</strong> things and to contain the attrition <strong>of</strong> the<br />

collection, tasks that are well-nigh impossible in an unindustrialized economy presided<br />

over mostly by rent-seeking elites. Roces, who conjures the image <strong>of</strong> the collection as<br />

tumor, speculates that this may have been an uncosmopolitan manner <strong>of</strong> sustaining the<br />

cosmopolitan ethos <strong>of</strong> collecting. And she has a very interesting case to make because <strong>of</strong><br />

two things: one is an antecedent modality <strong>of</strong> collecting through the endeavors <strong>of</strong> Luz in<br />

his gallery, which sold antiques ap<strong>art</strong> from marketing fine <strong>art</strong> in the same space, as well<br />

as in MOPA, and second, the Filipiniana collection at the Center. This “ethnographic”<br />

strain in Luz, who extensively traveled and whose abstraction was inspired by temple<br />

and cloth in Asia, would nuance the De Santos and Badillo collection at the Center, supposedly<br />

curated as objets d’<strong>art</strong> by Locsin, whose family in 2008 loaned to Ayala Museum<br />

its exceptional reserve <strong>of</strong> gold and donated to the National Museum Felix Resurreccion<br />

Hidalgo’s The Assassination <strong>of</strong> Governor Bustamante and His Son in 2006. In Fernando<br />

Zobel’s book Philippine Religious Imagery, he states that Luz “owns the finest existing<br />

collection <strong>of</strong> statuettes in the popular style” and that Locsin and his wife Cecilia <strong>of</strong> the<br />

wealthy Yulo clan “have a small but very select collection consisting <strong>of</strong> carefully chosen<br />

examples <strong>of</strong> every style.” 44 The Locsins, who have held the country’s most important<br />

private collection, were also interested in archaeology, having written the important book<br />

Oriental Ceramics Discovered in the Philippines (1967), a culmination <strong>of</strong> their excavations<br />

in Sta. Ana in Manila. This confirms that the Locsin-Ayala-Luz—and, <strong>of</strong> course,<br />

Marcos—loop perseveres.<br />

But this anti-object mentality in the conceptualist model may have in the same<br />

unnerving vein taken a different twist in the Marcos matrix, with things aleatory and<br />

embryonic mutating into things spiritual, the inverse <strong>of</strong> the material or the materialist; the<br />

scientific; or the rational. Emblematic is Jaime Zobel de Ayala’s statement: “The Center<br />

is deeply relevant to our times because a recourse to the spirit and things spiritual is very<br />

much warranted in a time <strong>of</strong> material crisis.” 45 And surely, this appeal to the ineffable may<br />

have been Imelda’s access to <strong>art</strong>, the best way for her to kindle kinship with <strong>art</strong>ists. As<br />

gifted essayist and speechwriter Kerima Polotan Tuvera puts it: “Though she had never<br />

written or painted, and what singing she had done had been on small stages, she understood<br />

the <strong>art</strong>istic alchemy, and if she did not burn deeply with the fever that raged in all <strong>art</strong>ists,<br />

she nursed a touch <strong>of</strong> that sweet delirium, and many saw in her a kindred soul.” Thus,<br />

Imelda, whose penchant for adornment and decoration – indeed, beautification -- imbued<br />

her festivalist imaginary, was, therefore, attracted to <strong>art</strong>, a fascination that required no<br />

exegesis. This rambling rumination is fabulist: “I like the modern. I like the abstract. I<br />

like them because they get me thinking. You know, sometimes I do not understand them.<br />

I like things I do not understand because they make me curious. I do not claim to be a<br />

technician or a scientist in the <strong>art</strong>s. But, as I always say, when I like something, I like it<br />

even though I have no reason for it. Just like friends. There are friends you like but you<br />

don’t know the reason.There are paintings you like but you don’t know the reason.” 46<br />

It is this reverie that coddled the dreams <strong>of</strong> Imelda <strong>of</strong> the Platonic ideals <strong>of</strong> the true, the<br />

good, and the beautiful. When Imelda, a woman <strong>of</strong> appreciable beauty and charisma,<br />

spoke <strong>of</strong> these virtues, it looked and sounded exceedingly credible.<br />

Finally, and this is the other path through which the “collecting” at the Center may<br />

have been paved: the conceptualist posture to question the basis <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ness, or its objecthood<br />

within the spectrum <strong>of</strong> institutional critique, only that in this setting the institution<br />

itself <strong>of</strong> authoritarian rule was spared. Still, the instinct to appropriate material culture<br />

<strong>of</strong> everyday life and behold it on the plinths <strong>of</strong> the museum at the Center furthered the<br />

conceptualist mindset to restore the integrity <strong>of</strong> the object before it is devoured by the<br />

modernism <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> or the mercantilism <strong>of</strong> the market, to dematerialize it conceptually in<br />

a paradoxically sensory and intersubjective, even immersive, atmosphere.<br />

44 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


20. Reyes 1989, p 96.<br />

21. See Zobel de Ayala, Fernando. 1963.<br />

Philippine Religious Imagery. Manila:<br />

Ateneo de Manila University. Reyes<br />

1989, p. 62.<br />

22. Sibayan, Judy Freya. 1987. “Preface.”<br />

The Sensous Eye. Manila: Cultural Center<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Philippines, n. p.<br />

23. Reyes, Cid. 1987. “The Sensuous<br />

Eye: A Survey <strong>of</strong> Philippine Art Focusing<br />

on the Filipino Artists’ Vision <strong>of</strong> Beauty.”<br />

The Sensuous Eye. Manila: Cultural<br />

Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines, n. p.<br />

24. Pastor Roces, Marian. 1980. “Five<br />

Directions in a Steady State.” Philippine<br />

Art Supplement. November - December,<br />

p. 8.<br />

25. Tence Ruiz 2000, p. 59.<br />

26. Pastor Roces 1980, p. 9.<br />

27. Reyes 1989, p. 126,<br />

28. Reyes 1989, p. 124.<br />

29. Reyes 1989, p. 124.<br />

30. Reyes 1989, p. 125.<br />

31. Reyes 1989, p. 126.<br />

32. Reyes 1989, p. 163.<br />

33. Paulino 2005, p. 35.<br />

34. Reyes 1989, p. 54.<br />

35. Reyes 1989, p. 98.<br />

36. Reyes 1989, p. 184.<br />

37. See Baluyut, Pearlie Rose. 2005.<br />

“The Ayala Museum: A Site <strong>of</strong> Culture,<br />

Capital, and Displaced Colonial Desire.”<br />

Pananaw 5. Manila: National Commisiion<br />

for Culture and the Arts, pp. 6-17.<br />

38. De la Torre 1984, 51,<br />

39. Interview with David Cortez Medalla<br />

by author, May 2006, Madrid, Spain.<br />

40. De la Torre 1984, p. 90.<br />

41. Albano 1981, p. <strong>15</strong>.<br />

42. Interview with Marian Pastor Roces<br />

by author, December 2008.<br />

43. Zobel de Ayala 1963, pp. 35-36.<br />

44. Zobel de Ayala, Jaime. May 31, 1970.<br />

“A Closer Look at the CCP: Asia’s Mecca<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Arts.” No publication details.<br />

45. Pastor Roces, Marian. 1987. “Beauty<br />

or Wis: A Philippine Dilemma.” The<br />

Sensuous Eye. Manila: Cultural Center <strong>of</strong><br />

the Philippines, n. p.<br />

46. Reyes 1989, p. 101.<br />

47. Pastor Roces 1987, n. p.<br />

48. For this essay, the author consulted:<br />

Newman, Michael and Jon Bird. 1989.<br />

Rewriting Conceptual Art. London:<br />

Reaktion Books; Bernstein, J. M.<br />

2006. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late<br />

Modernism and the Meaning <strong>of</strong> Painting.<br />

Stanford: Stanford University Press;<br />

Global Conceptualism: Points <strong>of</strong> Origin<br />

1950s-1980s. New York: Queens Museum<br />

<strong>of</strong> Art.<br />

49. Bernstein 2006, p. 1.<br />

50. Lloyd, David and Paul Thomas.<br />

1998. Culture and the State. New York:<br />

Routledge, p. 1.<br />

The author wishes to thank Purissima<br />

Benitez-Johannot, Marian Pastor Roces,<br />

and Judy Freya Sibayan for their<br />

generous insights.<br />

While some <strong>art</strong>ists celebrated conceptualism, others were suspicious. Alfredo Roces<br />

would forward the opinion that “conceptual <strong>art</strong> is essentially an intellectual medium, a<br />

mental process” and he could not see it thriving in an “anti-intellectual” locale. 47 This<br />

may be supplemented by the lament <strong>of</strong> Chabet and Albano about Filipino critics; Albano,<br />

for instance, thinks that Emmanuel Torres’s tenor is too poetic. Marian Pastor Roces<br />

agrees, alerting us to a language that is florid, cardiac, verging on “swardspeak,” or gay<br />

lingo. Then she continues: “But you see, nobody likes critics; our entire sociological<br />

pr<strong>of</strong>ile denies the very notion <strong>of</strong> pointing a judgmental finger at another.” 48 How could<br />

have conceptualism flourished then without a flourishing <strong>art</strong> criticism? Was this vacuum<br />

filled by the <strong>art</strong>ist-curators like Chabet and Albano as an extension <strong>of</strong> their conceptualist<br />

practice?<br />

Such incommensurability is intrinsic in conceptualism itself, and this exhibition<br />

affords us the opportunity to look at its appropriation in Philippine <strong>art</strong>. Several publications<br />

and exhibitions have tried to discuss conceptualism in its philosophical and global<br />

registers under cognate terms like post-object <strong>art</strong>, <strong>art</strong>-as-idea, theoretical <strong>art</strong>, and so on. 49<br />

The line <strong>of</strong> flight <strong>of</strong> this reconsideration begins with the autonomy <strong>of</strong> the aesthetic as<br />

productive <strong>of</strong> the alienation and fragmentation obtaining in a modern society, or a society<br />

that is undergoing modernization. P<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the conceptualist venture was to undermine the<br />

sensuous p<strong>art</strong>icularity on which the universal aesthetic rests as a critique <strong>of</strong> modernism,<br />

but paradoxically through the recovery <strong>of</strong> the sensory that has been institutionalized as<br />

<strong>art</strong>, fetishized as commodity. This enterprise runs into thickets <strong>of</strong> internal contradictions,<br />

indeed ineluctably resulting in a failed negation: <strong>art</strong>’s formalism proves to be inescapable<br />

no matter how it tries to conflate itself with everyday life and non-<strong>art</strong>, and expectantly<br />

to disappear into the energy <strong>of</strong> the common. Artists might have taken Adorno’s fantasy<br />

too seriously: “To make things <strong>of</strong> which we do not know what they are.” 50<br />

Chabet belabored this in vain because he was confined to the Center and his own<br />

cult thereafter, which instrumentalized <strong>art</strong> as regulation <strong>of</strong>, precisely, everyday life;<br />

CCP’s outreach later with Albano at the helm may have colonized it as well in another<br />

modality <strong>of</strong> discrimination or being discriminating. This aporia might mean that their<br />

postmodernity was a continuity <strong>of</strong> modernism, and in some respects not even a critical<br />

nor a postcolonial one. This revisit is extremely indispensable in light <strong>of</strong> <strong>contemporary</strong><br />

<strong>art</strong>’s complicity in it and the fact that its binary critique <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> history is long over, having<br />

been absorbed into its domain as a genus, settling into, alas, a collection. There are many<br />

ways to spin this problematic, and the exhibition nudges us to introspect on a multitude<br />

<strong>of</strong> hints: if Philippine modernity at all reached a level <strong>of</strong> aesthetic autonomy; if Filipino<br />

conceptual <strong>art</strong>ists were persistent amateurs who failed to philosophize and therefore<br />

were not up to conceptualism’s metalinguistic demands, except perhaps for Hernando<br />

R. Ocampo, whom Albano thinks is conceptualism’s forerunner, Albano himself, David<br />

Cortez Medalla, Judy Freya Sibayan, Marian Pastor Roces by way <strong>of</strong> her idiosyncratic<br />

writing, and perhaps Lani Maestro; if conceptualism in these p<strong>art</strong>s was compromised<br />

because it failed to become activist and effected institutional critique; and other more<br />

painful possibilities.<br />

In 1867, Matthew Arnold declared that “Culture suggests the idea <strong>of</strong> the State.”<br />

David Lloyd and Paul Thomas thread through this thought by saying that: “Both are<br />

given the role <strong>of</strong> furnishing sites <strong>of</strong> reconciliation for a civil and political society that<br />

is seen to be riven by conflict and contradiction. Both are seen as the sites in which the<br />

highest expressions <strong>of</strong> human being and human freedom are realized. Both are seen as<br />

hedges against the political anarchy <strong>of</strong> rapidly transforming societies.”51 This exhibition<br />

complicates this idea, as the ethical formation <strong>of</strong> a polity (nation state, democracy,<br />

revolution) emerges from the critique <strong>of</strong> the coloniality <strong>of</strong> culture (identity, development,<br />

subjectivity).<br />

The collection at the Center, therefore, may be subjected at this seminal stage <strong>of</strong><br />

reconceiving it as property, as object, and as intellection. And it is most thrilling to just<br />

let it crawl out <strong>of</strong> the woodwork as a burdened corpus <strong>of</strong> things and deeds by privileged<br />

persons—be they the proletariat <strong>of</strong> a starving <strong>art</strong> world or potentates <strong>of</strong> an aggrandizing<br />

culture. In the Filipino culture <strong>of</strong> bereavement, this is our protracted padasal or prayer<br />

for repose to augur the babang luksa, the end <strong>of</strong> mourning and grief after forty years <strong>of</strong><br />

trying to achieve fitting p<strong>art</strong>ing from relics.<br />

45 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Prized Possessions:<br />

The Promise <strong>of</strong> the Contemporary<br />

in Philippine Art Competitions<br />

jay giovanni bautista<br />

It was in a painting competition that we had our first international recognition. At the<br />

Exposicion Nacional de Bellas Artes, there were earlier accounts that a Filipino student<br />

named Alfonso Calderon placed in 1866. What is certain is that a student Juan Novicio<br />

Luna won the silver medal at the same Madrid Art Exposition <strong>of</strong> 1881 for the seminal<br />

work, Death <strong>of</strong> Cleopatra, which he painted while on an excursion in Rome. Held every<br />

three years at the Salon in Madrid, the 26-year old Luna would even win the first gold<br />

medal for the masterpiece Spoliarium three years later. It will also be the same occasion<br />

that another Filipino named Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo will win the silver medal for<br />

his Virgenes Cristianas Expuetas al Papulacho which is now p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> the Bangko Sentral<br />

ng Pilipinas Painting Collection.<br />

It has always been the young and uninitiated that the lure for recognition seems<br />

strongest. Founder Purita Kalaw-Ledesma told author Cid Reyes in an interview that not<br />

only did the Art Association <strong>of</strong> the Philippines (AAP) become a formally organized <strong>art</strong><br />

association; it also provided the venue for competition that has become the perennial rite<br />

<strong>of</strong> passage when Filipino <strong>art</strong>ists were st<strong>art</strong>ing out. “The beauty <strong>of</strong> [AAP] competitions,<br />

[is that] students usually defeated their pr<strong>of</strong>essors. This happened many times and that’s<br />

why we discovered many raw and emerging talents. [Juvenal] Sanso for example won<br />

first prize defeating his pr<strong>of</strong>essors. I will not mention names, but time has proved that<br />

the judges were right about Sanso.” Kalaw-Ledesma recalls.<br />

AAP’s first <strong>of</strong>fing in 1948 saw Carlos “Botong” Francisco winning first prize with<br />

Kaingin showing farmers tilling their fields. So playful was the 35 year-old future maestro<br />

as he was so engrossed with playing basketball in Angono that he would even fail to attend<br />

the awarding ceremonies scheduled at the National Museum (then at Herran) with<br />

an impatient President Elpidio Quirino and other guests waiting for him in vain.<br />

Through generations after, the AAP Art Competition saw the likes <strong>of</strong> National Artists<br />

Jose Joya and Arturo Luz, Fernando Zobel, Federico Alcuaz, and Roberto Chabet Rodriguez<br />

winning the coveted plum. Getting temporary access to the few public exhibition<br />

venues in the metropolis was more than enough to the then struggling painter in them.<br />

Art contests became more pertinent then since the exhibitions attracted collectors<br />

and gallery owners alike. Only a handful <strong>of</strong> exhibition venues and <strong>art</strong> dealers existed<br />

in the 1960s. To name a few spaces were the Philippine Art Gallery showroom along<br />

Arquiza street in Malate, Gallery 7 in Makati Merchandising M<strong>art</strong> Bldg., and the new<br />

Luz Gallery that moved to E. Delos Santos Avenue.<br />

Among other initiatives to showcase Philippine <strong>art</strong> then, came from <strong>art</strong>ists and <strong>art</strong><br />

lovers themselves. Bencab opened Gallery Indigo, and F. Sionil Jose shared <strong>art</strong>works<br />

with his book space at the Solidaridad Galleries located a block from it in 1967. The<br />

other galleries that followed suit would eventually become the venue for winners <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong><br />

contests. These were Palette at Greenhills arcade, Capitol in Quezon City, Arts and Ends<br />

at the Savoy Hyatt Hotel, Gaerie Bleu at Rustan’s in Makati,and Gallery One at the PCIB<br />

building in San Juan, Rizal.<br />

With the inauguration <strong>of</strong> the Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines in 1969, the Philippine<br />

<strong>art</strong> scene was altered to conform to the dictates <strong>of</strong> the “new society.” As we all know<br />

First Lady Imelda Marcos would be influential in calling the shots in the visual <strong>art</strong>s as<br />

she took care <strong>of</strong> the few <strong>art</strong>ists she favored (they know who they are) to the detriment <strong>of</strong><br />

the equally deserving painters but who did not have collectors.<br />

46 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


Don’t Touch the Wet Paint, To Each His Own<br />

In a country where the <strong>art</strong>s get so little <strong>of</strong> the attention it needs to survive, let alone<br />

thrive, the encouragement given by an <strong>art</strong> contest is much sought after and close to wanting.<br />

Next to the AAP, the oldest <strong>art</strong> contest is the Shell National Student Art Competition<br />

(NSAC) which has vowed to continue their creative tradition on its 42nd anniversary<br />

this year.<br />

The NSAC has long been bestowing certain immortality to <strong>art</strong>ists at the onset <strong>of</strong><br />

their creative vocation. And even in its latter years, an <strong>art</strong>ist would join competitions like<br />

NSAC not for the prize but prestige.<br />

“Art competitions have come a long way from the time I used to join them. I remember<br />

p<strong>art</strong>icipating in the Shell student <strong>art</strong> competition in 1962 and the cash award<br />

was 250 pesos. The current crop <strong>of</strong> visual <strong>art</strong>ists is privileged to have supportive entities<br />

to encourage them to develop and produce outstanding works <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>.” National Artist<br />

Benedicto Cabrera was once quoted in an <strong>art</strong> book.<br />

In 1984, Metropolitan Bank & Trust Company captured the call <strong>of</strong> the epoch and<br />

created the Metrobank Young Painters Annual (MYPA). Open to all Filipinos not more<br />

than 35 years old and who have not had a solo exhibition, the YPA is an open painting<br />

competition with “sign <strong>of</strong> the times” as an unwritten yet guiding theme to this day. Three<br />

years ago it was renamed Metrobank Art & Design Excellence (MADE) to accommodate<br />

other categories like Architecture, Interior Design, and Achievement in Sculpture.<br />

More than the cash prize it provides as incentive and a selling show during the awards<br />

night, the YPA has helped launched the careers <strong>of</strong> Roberto Feleo, Gabriel Barredo, Dennis<br />

Gonzales, Elmer Roslin, Maria Taniguchi, Leslie de Chavez, Norman Dreo, Alwin<br />

Reamillo and most <strong>of</strong> the members <strong>of</strong> the Salingpusa—Mark Justiniani, Elmer Borlongan,<br />

Ferdinand Montemayor, Anthony Palomo, Tony Leaño, and Karen Flores.<br />

Four years after, in 1988, the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company in<br />

p<strong>art</strong>nership with the Directory Philippines Corporation would launch a unique and innovative<br />

scheme to promote Filipino values though the PLDT-DPC Telephone Directory<br />

Cover Visual Art Competition. Past winners like Gerri Dueñas, Alfredo Esquillo Jr, and<br />

Jaypee Samson saw their works being awarded and selected as cover in the PLDT-DPC<br />

directory.<br />

Esquillo, who was 28 years old then when he won almost every <strong>art</strong> award there is,<br />

tis a three-time winner <strong>of</strong> PLDT-DPC Telephone Directory Cover Visual Art Competition,<br />

the 1993 Metrobank Young Painters Annual Grand Prize winner, and two-time Philip<br />

Morris Asean Art winner. He still sees these <strong>art</strong> contests as relevant today, however only<br />

at a certain phase in one’s <strong>art</strong>istic career.<br />

“For the student, significant yung may approval ng new ground or experiment mo<br />

by the judges who are also critics in the <strong>art</strong> community. The only challenge is after the<br />

<strong>art</strong> contests, paano mo susundan?” said Esquillo, now 36 years old, emphasized in an<br />

interview.<br />

Other awards would come in as a corporation or government <strong>of</strong>fice saw these fit<br />

in their marketing strategies and overall company advocacies. There’s the Philip Morris<br />

Philippine Art Awards in 1997, ArtPetron National Student Competition in 2001, and<br />

the GSIS National Painting Competition in 2004. This year adding to the list there’s the<br />

LRT (Light Rail Transit) Art Competition, Pagalingang Pinoy by the city government<br />

<strong>of</strong> Makati and the Figurative Art Competition sponsored by the Big and Small Gallery<br />

and Philippine Drawing Society where at stake is a house and lot and cash prize for the<br />

lucky painting.<br />

As these <strong>art</strong> competitions were born, there were those who died a natural death.<br />

Some <strong>of</strong> them were Dow Jones Art Contest for People with Disability, the Nokia Digital<br />

Art Competition, Letras Y Figuras by Instituto Cervantes and the Remy M<strong>art</strong>in Public<br />

Art Competition, whose approved winning studies have already been executed as large<br />

works on the walls along Roxas Boulevard fronting Rizal Park. In fact, some <strong>of</strong> these<br />

murals are currently in critical condition and up for restoration, a sad reflection <strong>of</strong> the<br />

short-term planning some corporations that sponsor them have.<br />

47 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


The choice <strong>of</strong> judges in <strong>art</strong> competitions remains to be a factor. It is they who will<br />

decide, debate and dignify the winning <strong>art</strong> work. How do they say one work is better<br />

than the other? Each judge will definitely have his or her own preconceived biases and<br />

cultural notions.<br />

You cannot deny that a winner <strong>of</strong> a major <strong>art</strong> competition earns a certain pedigree<br />

<strong>of</strong> instant marketability. Even an exhibition slot would <strong>of</strong>tentimes depend on how many<br />

<strong>art</strong> awards an <strong>art</strong>ist has won.<br />

“Some <strong>art</strong>ists have luck in competitions, however others who won, I don’t know<br />

where they are now?” inquires Emmanuel Garibay, who also won the AAP Grand Prize<br />

for his work Santwaryo in 1993 and the NCCA Diwa ng Sining in 1994.<br />

“Depending on what you mean by relevance, as in all things, there is the good and<br />

bad side <strong>of</strong> it” Garibay explains further. “There is a conscious contextual reflection <strong>of</strong><br />

what is going on in the country. Then there is the repeating <strong>of</strong> styles. Who ever won that<br />

year will definitely be imitated next year. In the end, it’s the <strong>art</strong>ist’s persistence and passion<br />

that sustain him in the years to come.”<br />

With a few variations submitted by a small circle <strong>of</strong> painters who win <strong>art</strong> contests<br />

year after year, other p<strong>art</strong>icipants bewail what they think are repetitive works. A situation<br />

like this puts oneself in a tight corner and Garibay’s comment has also been validated by<br />

other <strong>art</strong>ists who have won these <strong>art</strong> prizes.<br />

Elmer Borlongan’s Tampuhan (roughly: “Lovers’ Quarrel) comes to mind. Although<br />

it placed second only in the MYPA in 1992, the winning work inspired more entries<br />

imitating his social realist style in the following years. This domino-effect even created<br />

a resurgence <strong>of</strong> social realism (as espoused by his Salingpusa group) that st<strong>art</strong>ed with<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists-activists during M<strong>art</strong>ial Law in the 1970s.<br />

Another <strong>art</strong>ist who has set a trend was Neil Manalo meticulously filling up the canvas<br />

with images in an altar-like triptych form as p<strong>art</strong> <strong>of</strong> his graphic handle for the winning<br />

cover <strong>of</strong> the PLDT DPC directory. Again this kind <strong>of</strong> aesthetics would eventually dictate<br />

upon future submissions <strong>of</strong> “worshiping” students. Meanwhile the “longest” idol in Shell<br />

Student Art Competition is Ronald Ventura whose painstaking depiction <strong>of</strong> the human<br />

anatomy has become a standard emulated long after the applause faded and the trophy<br />

has been handed to him. Maybe Ventura brought back the excitement since before his<br />

winning, Shell had been criticized for just hanging on to its long years <strong>of</strong> experience, that<br />

boredom had seeped in and nothing new had come out <strong>of</strong> its winners.<br />

Fresh Paint All the Time<br />

With the earliest paintings dating back to when religious orders built their churches<br />

and painted their walls with religious images to magnify their faith, Philippine painting,<br />

as an adopted western <strong>art</strong> form, is as old as colonialism itself.<br />

In the last 30 years however there seems to be a deliberate effort in <strong>art</strong> contests to<br />

rediscover and appropriate pre-colonial images, motifs, and western belief systems as<br />

means <strong>of</strong> sourcing one’s identity in the midst <strong>of</strong> a rapidly changing milieu.<br />

The irony <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> contests is that students try to unlearn whatever formal <strong>art</strong> practice<br />

they imbibed in their respective fine <strong>art</strong>s schools in every new entry they submit. Some<br />

<strong>of</strong> them did not only earn the accolade but are changing the overall landscape <strong>of</strong> painting<br />

and thus issuing an indirect refutation to what an American <strong>art</strong> critic called the “end <strong>of</strong><br />

painting” ten years ago. Mark Andy Garcia’s Attack <strong>of</strong> the Righteous (MADE, 2007) is<br />

another case in point. His work depicts his sordid experience <strong>of</strong> working in the Middle<br />

East where in the most unlikely place, he even became a born again Christian. Done in<br />

quick, unequal with <strong>of</strong>ten tempered brushstrokes, the last thing you would think is that<br />

it is religious. With this work, he created an unusually hardcore piece deep in faith and<br />

morality.<br />

John Paul Antido’s El Viaje de Familia (ArtPetron, 2005) uses mapping as a graphic<br />

handle to literally convey the distance and the exodus <strong>of</strong> the Filipino family in the ongoing<br />

diaspora <strong>of</strong> Filipinos to the different p<strong>art</strong>s <strong>of</strong> the world.<br />

48 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


In the long tradition <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> contests, every p<strong>art</strong>icipating student <strong>art</strong>ist knows that<br />

there exists some kind <strong>of</strong> aesthetics or strategy when joining a p<strong>art</strong>icular visual <strong>art</strong> competition.<br />

A fetish for the new and original in approach, as far as the <strong>art</strong>istic process, is a<br />

must for a work to be noticed among the many others. Together with that is the creative<br />

use in materials and add to that the work must reflect Philippine <strong>contemporary</strong> life and<br />

issues as these are what are to be expected. As keenly observed, there seems to be a gray<br />

area as far as representational style is concerned. Lately there are no delineating lines<br />

whether your work is abstract or representational, biographical or political.<br />

Consider Vince Darwin Jumalon’s Sisikapin Kong Maging Isang Tunay na (I Will<br />

Strive to be a true, Philip Morris Asean Art Competition, 2005). The mosaic-like image<br />

<strong>of</strong> a woman filled with emotion was created using Japanese-anime stickers as a visual<br />

material. Or the recent Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards where Marina Cruz’s Embroidered<br />

Landscape <strong>of</strong> My Mothers’ Life: A Biography featured an infant’s dress worn<br />

by the <strong>art</strong>ist’s mother, this being carefully stitched over and thus serving as a backdrop<br />

or a printed over canvas.<br />

There is little intervention in terms <strong>of</strong> painting in these two works which are essentially<br />

“painting” without, or with minimal use <strong>of</strong> paints. No one really knows what<br />

holds in <strong>contemporary</strong> Philippine <strong>art</strong> as seen in these past winners. The canvas has never<br />

been this wide open to possibilities indeed.<br />

Interviews<br />

Robert Besana, 13 July 2008<br />

Alfredo Esquillo Jr, 13 July 2008<br />

Emmanuel Garibay, 11 July 2008<br />

Kirby Roxas, 11 July 2008<br />

References<br />

Duldulao, Manuel D. Contemporary<br />

Philippine Art: From the Fifties to the<br />

Seventies. Vera-Reyes, 1971.<br />

Ramirez, Eileen L. “Crossbred and<br />

?migré: Visual Arts in a Flux” National<br />

Commission for Culture and the Arts,<br />

undated essay.<br />

Reyes, Cid. Conversations in Philippine<br />

Art. Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines,<br />

1989.<br />

An earlier version <strong>of</strong> this essay came out<br />

in the catalogue for the Inaugural Exhibition<br />

<strong>of</strong> Britania Art Projects in 2008.<br />

The Paint that Lasts a Lifetime<br />

Each annual <strong>art</strong> competition rethinks conventions <strong>of</strong> the paint medium, thus, renewing<br />

faith and hope in its prospect <strong>of</strong> coming out with what is a fresh and captive representation<br />

<strong>of</strong> our present urban life. Do the contest rules <strong>of</strong> different <strong>art</strong> contests force them<br />

to question, if not rebel against conventions <strong>of</strong> painting? Recent winners vary greatly<br />

not just in terms <strong>of</strong> style or materials but also in terms <strong>of</strong> concerns, themes, and agenda.<br />

New spaces <strong>of</strong> promise in terms <strong>of</strong> iconography and iconology have emerged.<br />

Art competitions may still have their purpose as they are held in bigger exhibition<br />

halls with longer duration. There is a history <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> that is well documented in the yearly<br />

catalogues, and winning <strong>art</strong>ists are guided at least until their first formative shows. In a<br />

way, they consequently promote the culture <strong>of</strong> excellence and <strong>art</strong>istic promise for these<br />

young painters. The question that remains is: what have the previous winners done as a<br />

plow back to their community or to society to be worthy <strong>of</strong> these prizes?<br />

Esquillo perfectly sums it up, “You have to remember that it is only one work per<br />

<strong>art</strong> contest. You are good only until such time you will have a body <strong>of</strong> work to be proud<br />

<strong>of</strong>. Age will dictate if you are ripe for these competitions. There comes a time (when),<br />

you have to give chance to other younger ones to shine.”<br />

With the scarcity <strong>of</strong> blockbuster exhibits, painting competitions have provided the<br />

alternative excitement in showcasing their winners. Even in big galleries there is much<br />

to consider in conceptualizing and planning <strong>of</strong> shows for their calendar year. In fact the<br />

general sentiment is not the <strong>art</strong> spaces in the malls but the “continuous malling culture”<br />

<strong>of</strong> our museums and galleries.<br />

How Philippine <strong>art</strong> can become relevant to the times given this situation remains to<br />

be seen. In the meantime, there has always been the steady flow <strong>of</strong> grand prize winners<br />

in the yearly <strong>art</strong> competitions. It would be unwise to say that all these winning works<br />

merely reflect the general state <strong>of</strong> Philippine visual <strong>art</strong>s. With the de<strong>art</strong>h <strong>of</strong> Philippine<br />

<strong>art</strong> books written, could the history <strong>of</strong> Philippine <strong>art</strong> be told in patched-like quilts <strong>of</strong> all<br />

winning works <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> contests through the years?<br />

One good thing that has come out <strong>of</strong> this is that there seems to be a following for<br />

winners <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong> competitions p<strong>art</strong>icularly since serious collectors are getting younger (in<br />

their 30s and 40s) compared to 40 years ago when <strong>art</strong> buying was confined to friends <strong>of</strong><br />

the <strong>art</strong>ists.<br />

Until a more pr<strong>of</strong>essional system has been set up for the benefit <strong>of</strong> the young wouldbe-<strong>contemporary</strong>-Filipino<br />

<strong>art</strong>ist, there will always be a long line <strong>of</strong> those submitting in<br />

the next <strong>art</strong> contest. In the end, <strong>art</strong> as an investment should enrich one’s life or fill up a<br />

blank canvas.<br />

49 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


enee alphonso<br />

Review<br />

The Brave New Works <strong>of</strong> 13A<br />

Subject/Object. Installation by<br />

MM Yu. 2009 13 Artists exhibition.<br />

Cultural Center <strong>of</strong> the Philippines.<br />

Photo credits: MM Yu.<br />

Transformation as a process implicates change; a metamorphosis that may or may not<br />

require any change in circumstance. This is the premise that surrounds the Thirteen Artists’<br />

Awards exhibition, entitled Brave New Works and curated by former awardee Wire<br />

Tuazon (2003).<br />

The awards first arose as a curatorial project <strong>of</strong> the Center’s first curator, conceptual<br />

<strong>art</strong>ist Roberto Chabet. Over the years the project then developed into an exhibition and<br />

awards, featuring progressive, young <strong>art</strong>ists whose works embody the engagement <strong>of</strong><br />

Philippine <strong>art</strong> in its present day context.<br />

The exhibit is transformative in three ways. First, on a more obvious level, is the<br />

context <strong>of</strong> physical space. Divisions within the gallery are quite literally nonexistent, as<br />

the <strong>art</strong>works seem to seamlessly bleed into one another. Upon closer inspection, elements<br />

from certain works, like the tiny plastic mice from Buen Calubayan’s work, and MM<br />

Yu’s photographs <strong>of</strong> the exhibit’s installation process, integrate themselves into other<br />

works, making the installations interact with each other as well as their audience. Thus<br />

formed from this interaction is a alternative reality, in which physical space is not simply<br />

a setting but also an element contributing to the exhibit’s poignancy—whether for better<br />

or worse. Mr Tuason regrets in his curatorial statement that the exhibition did not have<br />

enough spatial freedom, as the institution did not welcome works that were to integrate<br />

other spaces outside the main gallery.<br />

Second, the exhibit invites us to rethink and ultimately transform our perception <strong>of</strong><br />

what <strong>art</strong> is, and what it means in the Filipino context today. Each <strong>art</strong>ist tackles themes such<br />

as family and home, religion, culture and national<br />

identity in their work. Their methods are meticulous<br />

but by no means timid; and each installation<br />

resonates with a distinct personal voice, skilled in<br />

technique and pulsating with the sentiments <strong>of</strong> a<br />

generation <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>ists. It is by these methods that the<br />

<strong>art</strong>ists engage viewers to p<strong>art</strong>icipate in this challenge<br />

<strong>of</strong> reinvention. Christina Dy’s “obsessive”<br />

drawing, as she terms it, creates an atmosphere<br />

upon entrance that draws out attention and allows<br />

us to re-examine and re-think where it is we stand,<br />

physically and on a more metaphysical level. Winner<br />

Jumalon’s witty and skilled reconstruction <strong>of</strong><br />

his family’s Zambales home tackles themes <strong>of</strong><br />

displacement, nostalgia, and disturbance. Kawayan<br />

De Guia’s rather interesting take on a Jukebox expresses the sentiments <strong>of</strong> a community<br />

and culture, refined into elements that come together into an awe-inspiring image.<br />

Perhaps most importantly, however, is how this exhibition is transformative in terms<br />

<strong>of</strong> the possibilities it presents for Philippine <strong>art</strong>. These works are works that incite bravery<br />

—bravery to actively p<strong>art</strong>icipate in the discourse that contributes to the progression and<br />

development <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>. Circumstances may not have changed completely, nor have spatial<br />

boundaries been completely traversed, but the work presented here may be the beginning<br />

<strong>of</strong> a true metamorphosis. By challenging current boundaries through the engagement <strong>of</strong><br />

method, context, space, perception and interpretation, the exhibit invites us to take a risk,<br />

and step into a brave new world.<br />

50 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


About <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> Journal <strong>of</strong> Contemporary Art<br />

<strong>Ctrl+P</strong> was founded in 2006 by Flaudette May V. Datuin and Judy Freya Sibayan as a response to<br />

the de<strong>art</strong>h <strong>of</strong> critical <strong>art</strong> publications in the Philippines. It is produced in Manila and published on the<br />

Web with zero funding. Contributors write gratis for <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>. Circulated as a PDF file via the Net, it<br />

is a downloadable and printable publication that takes advantage <strong>of</strong> the digital medium’s fluidity, immediacy,<br />

ease and accessibility. <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> provides a testing ground for a whole new culture and praxis<br />

<strong>of</strong> publishing that addresses very specifically the difficulties <strong>of</strong> publishing <strong>art</strong> writing and criticism in<br />

the Philippines. It took p<strong>art</strong> in the documenta 12 magazines project, a <strong>journal</strong> <strong>of</strong> 97 <strong>journal</strong>s from all<br />

over the world. (http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/)<br />

About <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>’s Contributors<br />

Kubilay Akman is a sociologist, academician, <strong>art</strong> critic and editor from Turkey. He studied sociology<br />

at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Istanbul, Turkey) and completed his PhD dissertation in 2006<br />

at the same university. Akman has been in Southeast Asia several times to p<strong>art</strong>icipate in academic<br />

events and projects, including ASEAN Inter-University Conference in Manila, Philippines (2008).<br />

His academic interests are sociology <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>s, sociology <strong>of</strong> literature, cultural studies, social theory<br />

and philosophy. l Renée Alfonso is a graduate <strong>of</strong> Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, and currently a<br />

Master’s student in Exhibition Design at the Corcoran College <strong>of</strong> Art and Design in Washington, DC.<br />

She has previously worked at the Lopez Museum in Pasig, Philippines. l Jay Giovanni Bautista<br />

presently works as a Project Development Officer <strong>of</strong> Studio 5 Designs/Publishing. He studied for an<br />

MA in Art History at the University <strong>of</strong> the Philipines Diliman. He has been involved with the following<br />

publications: Malacañan Palace: The Official Illustrated History, Tanaw: The Bangko Sentral ng<br />

Pilipinas Painting Collection, and Brushstrokes From the He<strong>art</strong>: The First Five Years <strong>of</strong> ArtPetron<br />

and is currently working on a c<strong>of</strong>fee table book on Carlos “Botong” V. Francisco. l Gerry Coulter<br />

is a Full Pr<strong>of</strong>essor <strong>of</strong> Sociology (Art, Film, and Theory) at Bishop’s University, Canada. Recent peer<br />

review publications include: ‘Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence <strong>of</strong> Gaming,’ SAGE<br />

Journal: Games and Culture (Volume 2, Number 4, December, 2007:358-365) and at: http://www.<br />

sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/358; ‘The Poetry <strong>of</strong> Reversibility and the Other in The English<br />

Patient,’ Widescreen Journal. (Volume 1, Number 1, April 2008): http://widescreen<strong>journal</strong>.org/index.<br />

php/<strong>journal</strong>/<strong>art</strong>icle/view/<strong>15</strong>/14; ‘Baudrillard and Holderlin and the Poetic Resolution <strong>of</strong> the World’,<br />

Nebula, (Volume 5, Number 4, December 2008:145-164) and at: www.nobleworld.biz/Coulter.pdf. He<br />

also writes a qu<strong>art</strong>erly column for Euro Art (On-line) Magazine (http://www.euro<strong>art</strong>magazine.com). Dr.<br />

Coulter’s teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions most recently by Bishop’s University’s<br />

highest award for teaching the William and Nancy Turner Prize. He is the Founding and Managing<br />

Editor <strong>of</strong> the International Journal <strong>of</strong> Baudrillard Studies (On the Internet): (www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies).<br />

l Joselina Cruz is an independent curator based in Manila, Philippines. She was curator<br />

for the Singapore Biennale 2008 and one <strong>of</strong> the networking curators for the Jak<strong>art</strong>a Biennale 2009. She<br />

received her MA in Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College <strong>of</strong> Art (RCA), London and has worked<br />

as Curator for the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila, and as Assistant Curator for the Singapore<br />

Art Museum. She was curator for You are not a Tourist, Curating Lab, Singapore, co-curator for the<br />

exhibition, All the Best: The Deutsche Bank Collection and Zaha Hadid, and the Tapies retrospective<br />

both at the Singapore Art Museum. She has curated numerous exhibitions, writes essays, reviews,<br />

criticism and <strong>art</strong> commentary. l Gina Fairley, a former <strong>art</strong>s manager in America and Australia, is a<br />

freelance <strong>art</strong>s writer widely published across Asia and Australia. She is Regional Contributing Editor<br />

for Asian Art News (Hong Kong) and splits her time between Sydney and Southeast Asia. She runs the<br />

Sydney window space SLOT with <strong>art</strong>ist Tony Twigg. l Patrick D. Flores is Pr<strong>of</strong>essor at Dep<strong>art</strong>ment<br />

<strong>of</strong> Art Studies, University <strong>of</strong> the Philippines and Curator <strong>of</strong> the Vargas Museum. He is also Adjunct<br />

Curator <strong>of</strong> the National Art Gallery <strong>of</strong> the Philippines and Singapore. His recent book Past Peripheral:<br />

Curation in Southeast Asia was published by the National University <strong>of</strong> Singapore Museum.<br />

l Irene S. Leung received a doctorate in <strong>art</strong> history from the University <strong>of</strong> Michigan and a master<br />

in International Affairs at The New School. Irene has worked in a gallery, auction house, non-pr<strong>of</strong>it<br />

institutions, and academia in the United States and Asia. A native <strong>of</strong> Hong Kong, she is working as an<br />

<strong>art</strong>s development consultant in Malaysia this year. l Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is a faculty member<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Dep<strong>art</strong>ment <strong>of</strong> Art Studies, University <strong>of</strong> the Philippines and curatorial consultant at the Lopez<br />

Memorial Museum. She has managed international projects and symposia including Locus: Critiquing<br />

Critical Art and serves as managing editor <strong>of</strong> Panananw, Philippine Journal <strong>of</strong> Visual Arts. Her essays<br />

have appeared in Transit: A Quaterly <strong>of</strong> Art Discussion, Fine Art Forum, Forum on Contemporary Art<br />

and Society, n.paradoxa: international feminist <strong>art</strong> <strong>journal</strong>, RealTime+Onscreen, ArtIT in Japan and<br />

Asia-Pacific, Visual Arts Magazine, Indonesia, Metropolis M, C-Arts, and the Sunday Inquirer. She<br />

is a 2009 US Endowment for the Arts International Visual Arts Journalism fellow. l Eliza Tan is a<br />

writer and curator from Singapore, currently based in London. Further to completing her <strong>art</strong> history<br />

degree at the Courtauld Institute <strong>of</strong> Art, she presently curates 7.9 Cubic Metres at the Stanley Picker<br />

Gallery, a 12 month evolving program <strong>of</strong> exhibitions and a platform for emerging British talent as well<br />

as international <strong>art</strong>ists. A regular contributor to <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>, Eliza has worked on various projects with the<br />

National Arts Council, Singapore, The Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, Art Forum Berlin and<br />

European Art Projects.<br />

51 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009


About <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>’s Editorial Board Members<br />

Flaudette May V. Datuin, associate pr<strong>of</strong>essor at the Dep<strong>art</strong>ment <strong>of</strong> Art Studies, UP Diliman, is c<strong>of</strong>ounding<br />

editor <strong>of</strong> <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>; co-founder and current chair <strong>of</strong> the House <strong>of</strong> Comfort Art Network or<br />

ARTHOC, a non-pr<strong>of</strong>it organization that conducts <strong>art</strong> workshops for the underprivileged and the afflicted.<br />

A 2008 Visiting Fellow (with grant) in the Research School <strong>of</strong> Humanities at the Australian National<br />

University (2008), Datuin is also recipient <strong>of</strong> the Asian Scholarship Foundation (ASF) and Asian Public<br />

Intellectual (API) fellowships, which enabled her to conduct research on <strong>contemporary</strong> women <strong>art</strong>ists<br />

<strong>of</strong> China and Korea (2002-2003) and Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan (2004-2005). Author<br />

<strong>of</strong> Home Body Memory: Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts, 19th Century to the Present (University<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Philippines Press, (2002), she also curates and organizes international and local exhibits and<br />

publishes here and abroad. Datuin currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Art Theory<br />

and Aesthetics, Art History, Philippine Art and Society, and Art and Society, Asian <strong>contemporary</strong> <strong>art</strong><br />

and aesthetics and gender issues in the <strong>art</strong>s. She obtained her MA and PhD in Philippines Studies from<br />

the University <strong>of</strong> the Philippines.<br />

Varsha Nair lives in Bangkok, Thailand. Her selected shows include Still Moving Image, Devi Art<br />

Foundation, New Delhi, 2008; A Proper Place, Ryllega Gallery, Hanoi, 2007; Art as Environment:<br />

Cultural Actions on Tropic <strong>of</strong> Cancer 007, Taiwan; Exquisite Crisis & Encounters, NYU, New York,<br />

2007; Subjected Culture-Interruptions and resistances on femaleness, venues in Argentina 2007-2008;<br />

Sub-Contingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Fondazion Sandretto Re Rebaudengo,<br />

Turin, Italy, 2006; In-between places, meeting point, Si-am Art Space, Bangkok, 2005; Video as Urban<br />

Condition, Austrian Culture Forum, London, UK, 2004, With(in), Art In General, New York, 2002;<br />

Home/Dom, Collegium Artisticum, Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, 2002; Free Parking, Art Center,<br />

Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 2002. She performed at On the Move, Hong Kong, 2008; Khoj<br />

Live Performance Festival, Delhi, 2008; Saturday Live, Tate Modern London, 2006; National Review<br />

<strong>of</strong> Live Art, 2006 and 2004; National Review <strong>of</strong> Live Art Midland, Perth, Australia, 2005.Since 1997,<br />

Nair has also curated and organized Womanifesto (www.womanifesto.com) and other <strong>art</strong> related activities,<br />

and has been invited as speaker at various international symposia. She was the Bangkok curator<br />

<strong>of</strong> 600 Images/60 <strong>art</strong>ists/6 curators/6 cities: Bangkok/Berlin/London/Los Angeles/Manila/Saigon, an<br />

exhibition that was simultaneously exhibited in all 6 cities in 2005. Born in Kampala, Uganda, Nair<br />

has a BFA from Faculty <strong>of</strong> Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda, India.<br />

Judy Freya Sibayan, co-founding editor <strong>of</strong> <strong>Ctrl+P</strong>, has an MFA from Otis Art Institute <strong>of</strong> Parsons<br />

School <strong>of</strong> Design. She is former director <strong>of</strong> the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum <strong>of</strong> the Philippines.<br />

She performed and curated Scapular Gallery Nomad, (www.asa.de/magazine/iss4/17sibayan.<br />

htm) a gallery she wore daily for five years (1997-2002), and is currently co-curator and the Museum<br />

<strong>of</strong> Mental Objects (MoMO), a performance <strong>art</strong> proposing that the <strong>art</strong>ist’s body be the museum itself<br />

(http://www.trauma-interrupted.org/judy/writing1.pdf). Although Sibayan’s major body <strong>of</strong> work is an<br />

institutional critique <strong>of</strong> <strong>art</strong>, she has also exhibited and performed in museums, galleries and performance<br />

venues such as Latitude 53, Edmonton, Canada; PEER Gallery Space, London; Privatladen in<br />

Berlin; The Tramway, Glasgow; the Vienna Secession; the Hayward Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art<br />

Center, The Farm in San Francisco; Sternersenmuseet; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; ArtSpace<br />

Sydney; The Kiasma Contemporary Art Center, The Mori Art Museum, The Museum <strong>of</strong> Far Eastern<br />

Antiquities, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Fukuoka Art Museum; Louisiana Museum <strong>of</strong> Modern Art,<br />

Hong Kong Art Centre; Museum <strong>of</strong> Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; and at the capcMusée d’<strong>art</strong><br />

contemporain de Bordeaux. She has p<strong>art</strong>icipated in two international <strong>art</strong> biennales, the 1986 3rd Asian<br />

Art Biennale Bangladesh and the 2002 Gwangju Biennale. Also an independent curator, she curated<br />

The Community Archives: Documenting Artists Collectively, Openly held at Latitude 53 (Edmonton,<br />

Alberta Canada). She also conceived and was lead-curator <strong>of</strong> xsXL Expanding Art held at Sculpture<br />

Square, Singapore in 2002 and 600 Images/60 Artists/6 Curators/6 Cities: Bangkok/Berlin/London/Los<br />

Angeles/Manila/Saigon in 2005. The latter two projects investigated the possibilities <strong>of</strong> developing large<br />

scale international exhibitions mounted with very modest resources. She currently teaches as an Assistant<br />

Pr<strong>of</strong>essor <strong>of</strong> the Dep<strong>art</strong>ment <strong>of</strong> Communication, De La Salle University (www.dlsu.edu.ph).<br />

52 <strong>Ctrl+P</strong> September 2009

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!